I am half Brazilian and half Portuguese, but born and raised in the USA. After completing my BA at New York University, I moved to Austria to teach English and soon after began my MA studies in English Linguistics. I hold a PhD in Modern English Linguistics from the University of Bern, Switzerland. As a linguist, I am concerned with how societies and macro social structures influence language use and attitudes among individuals and diverse communities of practice. My research focuses on how individuals’ daily socio-cultural practices (one of which is language) intersect with broader cultural, social and political-economic processes in and across space and time.
While at MultiLing, I will be working on a project entitled: “Managing people and managing language: polylingual practices in ‘blue-collar’ workplaces”. The term 'Blue-collar' is one of those fuzzy terms and has traditionally been used to mean workers that are in low-paid jobs, paid hourly (as opposed to being on salary) and often entail some sort of physical labor. Certain jobs include cleaners, construction workers, waitresses, dishwashers, for example.
This project centers on the latest conditions of national labor, language and immigration policies, their ensuing ideological underpinnings and emerging sociolinguistic practices by investigating how asymmetrical relations of power are maintained in and through discourse within ‘blue-collar’ workplace settings among migrant Brazilian employees and their Norwegian employers in Oslo, Norway.
This interdisciplinary project combines theories of globalization, mobility, and multilingualism with the aim of making new theoretical advances within the fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics concerning the ways in which migrants’ mobility and the type of work they engage in affect the way their polylingual practices are viewed, valued and used to better understand the linguistic implications of global mobility.
In my free time, I enjoy spending time with my husband and our three-year old daughter as well as alpine running, skiing and doing yoga.