[PLing] Guest Lecture by Melissa Moyer (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

[Jonas Hassemer]

Dear colleagues,

I'd like to invite you to a guest lecture by Melissa Moyer (Departament 
de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística, Universitat Autònoma de 
Barcelona) on /Reconstituting Identity and Agency Recognition, 
Multimodality, and Communicative Disruption after Acquired Brain Injury/.

The talk is hosted by the Doctoral School of Philological and Cultural 
Studies and open for everyone interested.

It will take place at the Department of Linguistics, Sensengasse 3a, 
Seminarraum 2 (1st floor) at 16:00.

*Abstract*

This paper examines how identity and agency are reconfigured following 
acquired brain injury (ABI), focusing on speakers with dysarthria. 
Drawing on a two-and-a-half-year ethnographic study, it analyzes 
multimodal interaction, narrative practices, and material environments 
to show that identity and agency are not individual properties but 
distributed across semiotic arrangements involving bodies, artefacts, 
technologies, and interlocutors. However, such distributed 
configurations remain fragile within social and institutional contexts 
that privilege linguistic competence. The paper advances the concept of 
reconstituted agency to account for how these arrangements are 
stabilized and extended across contexts, enabling identities to persist 
over time. It also considers how collective identification can extend 
these processes beyond interaction. In doing so, the paper develops a 
theoretical account of how agency is reorganized from distributed to 
reconstituted forms under conditions of communicative disruption.

*Melissa Moyer*is Professor of English Philology at the Universitat 
Autònoma de Barcelona. She recently held the Mercè Rodoreda Chair at the 
Graduate Center, CUNY where she taught a seminar on Sites of 
Multilingualism: A Critical Ethnographic Approach on contexts of 
multilingualism in Catalonia from a critical ethnographic focus. Her 
contributions to the study of bilingualism and multilingualism include 
work on multilingualism in Gibraltar, and London, and communication in 
various institutional sites in Catalunya dedicated to health, tourism, 
and job recruitment. Her publications include Language, Migration and 
Social Inequalities (2013) co-edited with Alexandre Duchêne and Celia 
Roberts, a special issue on Language, Mobility and Work in the Journal 
of Language and Intercultural Communication (2018), her book on methods 
The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and 
Multilingualism (2008), co-edited with Li Wei, and which received the 
2009 book prize by the British Association of Applied Linguistics. Her 
current areas of interest include language, identity, and disability.

All info here: 
https://ds-philkult.univie.ac.at/news-detail/news/guest-lecture-reconstituting-identity-and-agency/

Best wishes,

Jonas Hassemer

Dr. Jonas Hassemer (he, him)
University Assistant Postdoc in Applied Linguistics
Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna
Sensengasse 3a
A-1090 Vienna
+43-1-4277-41714

https://language-and-work-group.webnode.page/
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