Dr Andrea Ciribuco, NUI Galway, has won a 3-year Collaborative Research Fellowship in Italy to investigate the language experience of migrants in Europe.
Dr Andrea Ciribuco, postdoctoral fellow, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, NUI Galway.
The LINCS (Language Interaction and New Communities in a Multilingual Society) research project will look at language, the migrant experience, and cultural identity.
Due to its geographical position, Italy is centrally involved in addressing the movement of people from their home countries. This difficult, contentious and often emotional process will be at the heart of the LINCS project.
The LINCS project will investigate the language experience of migrants in Europe – such as language learning, translation and interpreting. It will also pay attention to the visibility and invisibility of the experience of migrants across cultural and geographical borders.
Dr Andrea Ciribuco, a postdoctoral fellow at NUI Galway, will develop the project under the mentorship of Dr Anne O’Connor from the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
As part of the LINCS project, Dr Ciribuco will spend two of the 3-years fellowship in Italy working with Italian Non-Government Organisation (NGO) Tamat, active since 1995 in supporting sustainable development, social enterprise, food security, gender empowerment and global citizenship.
The aim of the project is to achieve a better understanding of the links between language, cultural background, and how individuals present themselves in a new culture. This knowledge will be used to inform and promote language practices and policies, which will ultimately result in more inclusive societies.
Dr Ciribuco will meet with NGOs, institutions, cultural associations and migrant artists, exploring from different perspectives questions such as:
How much is a person’s cultural identity shaped by the languages that he or she speaks?
How do migrants adapt to communicate their identity in a new country?
What is lost in translation?
What place does art and literature occupy in intercultural dialogue?
In the third and final year of the project, Dr Ciribuco will return to NUI Galway, where the knowledge acquired from his two years of field work in Italy will be used to create collaborations and exchanges of knowledge with Irish organisations.
The project will create awareness of the ways in which we can remove linguistic obstacles to communication in a multicultural, multilingual Europe. It will be of particular interest to NGOs, local and European institutions as well as scholars.
This is the first time that NUI Galway has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions COFUND Collaborative Research Fellowship for a Responsive and Innovative Europe (CAROLINE) with the Irish Research Council.