The role of discourse and interaction in the construction and portrayal of social realities and relationships as well as the interconnections between linguistic and discourse structures and social contexts are central to my scholarly research. My research agenda has been evolving throughout the years from an initial interest in bilingual conversation and in phenomena related to contact between Italian and other languages, to a growing focus on narrative as a genre and as a discourse event, and to the investigation of the multiple relationships between language and identity in different contexts of interaction and among different social groups. I am also particularly interested in the study of immigrant communities: their language varieties, the relations between their language practices and the construction of different kinds of identities. These research topics come together in my work on Italian and Italians, a focus that I have kept throughout my career. Below I describe some of my work in key areas of interest.
My work on narrative has focused on the relationships between telling stories and constructing identities. In my book Identity in narrative: a study of immigrant discourse (2003, John Benjamins) I analyzed the emergence in discourse of significant aspects of the identity construction of a group of Mexican undocumented immigrants: for example their social orientation towards others, their attitudes towards ethnic labels, and the degree of agency with which they represent themselves in different worlds of experience. In further work, I investigated the relations between categorization in narrative and the emergence of shared representations about self and others in immigrant groups (Group identity, narrative and self representations in Discourse and Identity, see reference below)
I have also been particularly interested in the construction of space in narrative and in orientation as a discursive process that relates narratives to particular narrators and social identities. Thus, I have looked at orientation both as a discourse process and as a metaphor to understand phenomena of displacement and isolation in modern societies. These interests are reflected, among other publications, in the book Dislocations/ Relocations, Narratives of Displacement, co-edited with Mike Baynham (2005, St. Jerome Publishing).
Another, related area of interest is the way in which narratives and narrators relate to local and global contexts and the study of narrative as a process, rather than as a text (see, for example, the Special Issue of TEXT & TALK( 28-3, 2008) co-edited with Alexandra Georgakopoulou on “Narrative analysis: From text to practices.”
Although related to narrative, my research on language and identity has covered further ground. I have been advocating for a social constructionist approach to identities in language, but also for a combination of a focus on the detail of local interaction with a consideration of ways in which the larger context of social and discursive practices, ideologies and relations shapes and is shaped by language use. In addition, I have been interested in how different theoretical traditions and methodological tools within the social constructionist arena contribute to our understanding of identity in language. Such questions are at the center of the book Discourse and Identity, co-edited with Deborah Schiffrin and Michael Bamberg (2006, Cambridge University Press)
I have studied the transformations in the languages spoken by immigrant communities. In particular, I have focused on communities of Italian origin in Mexico, the U.S. and Australia analyzing the characteristics of the varieties of Italian that they speak (see my volume Italiano e italiani fuori d’Italia, co-edited with Franca Bizzoni, 2003, Guerra Edizioni). I have also been interested more in general in how immigrants cope with their new environments, in the role of linguistic practices in the emergence and definitions of identity and ethnicity . Recently I conducted an ethnographic study of a community of practice of Italian and Italian American men who meet to play card, to investigate the mechanisms through which collective identities are constructed and negotiated in practice (see for example my 2007 article “Code switching and the construction of ethnic identity in a community of practice”, Language in Society, 36, (3) 371-392.)