A panel of migration experts will reflect on the findings of the book New Migrations, New Multilingual Practices, New Identities: The Case of Post-2008 Italian, in conversation with the author, Giulia Pepe.
About the event
New Migrations, New Multilingual Practices, New Identities: The Case of Post-2008 Italian (Palgrave MacMillan) explores the linguistic repertoires of new Italian migrants in London and the multilingual practices in which they engage. Italian mass emigration restarted after the 2008 economic crisis, but this new migration continues a long tradition: Italians migrated en masse after the country’s unification and after the Second World War. In the UK, they mainly emigrated after the Second World War to industrial towns, such as Bedford. In contrast, London has become the favourite destination of the post-2008 crisis wave.
In the last decade, scholars focused on the social differences between past and new migrants, while the last linguistic study on the Italian community in London was carried out in the 1990s. The research at the basis of this book fills this gap.
Recorded data collected through ethnographic observations of social gatherings organised by new migrants is presented to show how migrants communicate multilingually and use multilingualism to negotiate their (new) social and professional identities. Interview data is also used to further explore and better understand participants’ ideologies around multilingualism, migration and their sense of belonging to and perception of the Italian community of London.
The panel will be chaired by Petros Karatsareas (University of Westminster) and will feature:
- Siria Guzzo (University of Salerno, Italy)
- Adriana Patiño-Santos (University of Southampton, UK)
- Carmen Silvestri (University of Essax, UK – Manifesto di Londra, UK)
- Diego Solinas (Consul of Italy, Italian Consulate of London, UK)
This event is jointly organised by the Westminster Forum for Language and Linguistics and HOMELandS (Hub on Migration, Exile, Languages and Spaces) of the University of Westminster.
Location
Fyvie Hall, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW
About the speakers
Siria Guzzo is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Universita’ degli Studi di Salerno. Her research interests lie in the field of sociolinguistics and language variation and change. She has published widely in the fields of migration and identity, new dialect/ethnolect formation, language contact and its outcomes, and first and second language acquisition. Her publications include investigations into the Anglo-Italian community in the UK.
Adriana Patiño-Santos is Associate Professor at the University of Southampton. She has expertise in sociolinguistic ethnography, language socialisation, narrative inquiry and multilingualism. She has concentrated on the social processes that are produced in daily-life encounters by focusing on the intersection between language, ideology and positioning. Her interests lie in the area of how young people and adults experience language issues when embarking upon life projects involving mobility.
Carmen Silvestri is a Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE)-funded PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex. Her project examines the role of multilingual education in post-Brexit England with the aim to understand how children perform and negotiate identities in contexts of superdiversity, and investigates multilingual practices and pedagogy in an Italian complementary school in London. She is a coordinating member of the association Manifesto di Londra that, in 2021, published the report The impact of Brexit and Covid on the Italian community in the UK.
Diego Solinas is Consul of Italy at the Italian Consulate of London. He was appointed in 2019, after he completed his appointment as First Secretary and Deputy Head of Mission of the Embassy of Italy to the State of Eritrea. He is an expert of Italian emigration and Italian community in the UK. In 2021, he curated the demographic and sociological analysis of the report La presenza italiana in Inghilterra e Galles: Studio Statistico, sponsored by the Italian Consulate of London. The report presents the statistic and sociological data on the Italian population in England and Wales.
Giulia Pepe is a sociolinguistic researcher, former PhD student at the University of Westminster, and teacher of Italian as L2 and as community language in London. Her research interests focus on language and identity, Italian language and dialectal varieties, and linguistic phenomena in migratory contexts. Her doctoral research investigated the multilingual practices and migration trajectories of post-2008 Italian migrant in London.
Petros Karatsareas is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Westminster. He specialises in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism with a focus on contexts of transnational mobility. Working on, with and for minoritised groups of migrant origin, he examines the central role language plays in processes and experiences of discrimination, precarisation, deskilling and downward occupational mobility among people on the move. He also works on bi-/multilingual education in diasporic contexts, such as that which is offered in complementary schools. He is the co-founder of the Special Interest Group on Multilingualism within the British Association for Applied Linguistics and current Co-Director of the London branch of the Bilingualism Matters network. He has also served as a Trustee of the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education.
