31.3030, Rising Stars: Meet Hortensia Barrios!

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3030. Wed Oct 07 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3030, Rising Stars: Meet Hortensia Barrios!

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Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2020 05:21:54
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Stars: Meet Hortensia Barrios!

 
Dear Readers,

For this week's Rising Star, we bring you the amazing work of Hortensia
Barrios. She is an MA Student in Applied Linguistics at the University of
Calgary and has done extensive work for the Living Migration Community
Research Project which is a project that has helped to make the first-person
narratives of immigrants a more valid source of data for researchers. Earlier
this year she carried out 5 different 2-3 day long Digital Storytelling
Workshops where she taught participants how to produce a well-crafted digital
story about their immigrant experience. This was quite an impressive amount of
work since the participants came from 5 very different countries but she
didn't stop there. After running those workshops, she also hosted two Digital
Storytelling Festivals where the work produced in those workshops was
premiered in-person and online to an audience of over 100. For this work she
was selected as a winner of the Innovation in Communication prize for the
Innovation Untold 2020 contest. As usual, the list goes on but let's get to
Hortensia's piece.

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As a sociolinguist, I see that there is a transformation in the way people use
languages to address changes. We are all finding ourselves in a world which we
were not trained for – regardless of place of birth, race or preferences. We
are all being forced to revisit ways of communicating in societies that have
been for a long time multicultural and diverse, but that are now facing
significant and rapid changes that include interconnectedness, changes in
dynamics of nation-state and other international actors, and more importantly,
minorities raising their voice and claiming spaces that for years were seized.

People are becoming more aware and starting to have a better understanding of
the significance language has in their day-to-day. Now, we see an increase of
people trying to understand and navigate the “new normal” – this also includes
parents learning with their kids, getting interested in, or struggling with,
their children’s learning journey, reading to them, and engaging in practices
that incorporate both linguistic and language awareness. From my perspective,
this is a fundamental shift that will change the way future generations use
and learn languages and also the way we do research.

My current research focuses on understanding the ways minorities construct
their multiple selves in socio-cultural situations through the instrumentality
of language. I do so assisted by digital storytelling workshops in which I
guided participants to craft individual digital stories that blend oral
narratives with compelling visuals and sounds. Through this data collection
method, I created opportunities for research participants to interpret,
analyze and document their experiences. The data collected during our meetings
is currently being analyzed using critical narrative inquiry.

I plan to continue engaging in collaborative, action-oriented, and creative
forms of scholarship. I believe that through innovative practices, we can hold
space to hear the voices of minorities, to give them the tools to speak up,
and to engage in meaningful conversations that can bring about change to the
people and communities we research.

******************************************************************

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