Dr. Alexander Nikolaou, adjunct faculty member at Hellenic American University, participated in the 24th International Symposium of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, which was organized by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki on October 2-4, 2020. He co-presented with former HAU faculty member Dr. Jennifer Sclafani, their work on “Indexicality and the interactional construction of identity in the narratives of 'return' migration”.
Their study investigates narrative accounts of “return” migration as told by second-generation bi-ethnic Greeks (Greek Americans in their majority) who migrated to Athens as adults. Based on a corpus of 12 ethnographic interviews about the linguistic and cultural experience of their ‘returns’, they focus on participants’ recounting of their relocation to their parents’ homeland as an experience of cultural assimilation and conflict, authenticity and hybridity. Narrative discourse has proven to be a fruitful locus for this area of inquiry because it allows speakers to construct and negotiate alignments and disalignments between Self and Other by adopting interactional positions in discourse. In line with current work on discourse and identity, the authors view identity as the product of discursive performance through a variety of linguistic devices.