Cultural semantics and pragmatics in Latin America
Languages in contact in South America
My research interest centers around the linguistic and cultural contact in the border cities between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, that has led to the contact language portuñol. I am interested in topics related to sociolinguistics, postcolonial linguistics and glottopolitics.
My research has been concentrated in São Paulo, Brazil, and has focused on how individuals and community groups, often marginal in status, create visibility in urban conditions through expressive culture, including music, vernacular language, and spatial networking. I employ qualitative methods, such as participatory observation, informal interviews, photography, and story elicitation. My latest book, Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Bloomsbury, 2021), is a collection of short stories based on ethnographic experience and an interpretation of song lyrics from the eponymous album by the legendary Brazilian rap group Racionais MCs.
My current research interests include socio-economic impacts and governance of non-renewable resource extraction in the Arctic, Latin America and the South Pacific. Since 2019, I have been involved in a project titled “Surviving Historical Memory in El Salvador”. My latest publication is a chapter in a book titled “Ideology, Post-ideology and Anti-Ideology in Latin America” published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Keywords: memory, activism, artistic practices, urban interventions, demonumentalisation
My research is primarily positioned within the field of cultural memory studies, but I am also interested in theory on aesthetics, political theory, decolonial theory, social movement theory and performance studies. For the moment, I am working on a doctoral project concerning the interconnections of memory and activism during the 2019/2020 Chilean social uprising, where I have a strong focus on artistic urban interventions and activist-driven memorial sites/archival projects concerning the memory of protest.
Applied research-creation across Latin America and Europe
I am passionate about learning how making art together with others affect us in such a way that we open up to them, even if they are different, even if they come from other countries, and in this opening up we become more empathetic, we love each other, we accept each other, we pamper each other and create community bonds. In the research project Transforming Migration by Arts (TransMigrARTS), funded by the European Union, we co-create artistic workshops with migrant people in Colombia, France, Spain and Denmark, with the intention of creating a network of researchers in Spanish and implementing the methodology of applied research-creation in our universities.
