My teenage daughter told me last Fall after her involvement in a few youth rallies around issues such as climate change and women’s rights, that I am ‘not really an activist or anything.’ She was, and still is, trying to understand how adults seem to put working and laundry ahead of creating the change that is needed in the world. I said that many of us have quieter forms of activism.
It was clear to me only a few weeks into the course Language, Identity and Culture with Professor Kim Brown that I would be pursuing the study of linguistics as a way to make the change I see needed in the world. Although I am genuinely interested in the teaching of language and comparative language studies, grammar nuances and most things language related, it is the pursuit of how I might contribute to the dialogue around cultural identity, language advocacy, and communication in the global world that occupies most of my brain on a given day outside of work, school, and parenting.
My academic focus in language as a general course of study began after living abroad in Germany after high school – where I was fascinated by how the German ‘dialect’ from the city of Köln seemed closer to Dutch than to German, but originally stemmed from my childhood experiences born to a Serbian immigrant father and American mother. Growing up with two different linguistic and cultural lenses on how the world works has been a constant theme in all that I have experienced over my lifetime.
Because of the gap between my initial college undergraduate degree and today, I come to the MA TESOL program eager to get to work. Working full time and raising my daughter as a single parent, graduate school was not an option for many years, but I was able to give my time and volunteer with groups and organizations around immigrant rights, language advocacy, endangered languages, and other personal interests. I have pursued work in leadership communication and conflict resolution over the last four years, where I have helped bridge cross-cultural and interdepartmental communication between teams and departments within organizations experiencing communication dysfunction. Over the last year in the MA TESOL program, I have been drawing on these varied experiences to enrich my academic studies and help funnel my focus.
In my graduate studies at PSU, I have been fortunate enough to have been included in a research project in connection with CLEAR Global around Somali minority language advocacy as well as membership in an internationally collaborative project around southernizing applied linguistics, positioning itself for initial work to be showcased at the upcoming AAAL colloquium. I am working on developing my MA thesis around war, forced ethnic migration, and the effects of this trauma on language speech acts, family linguistic systems and identity. I hope to see how I might further my research work from my experience in these projects.
Upon graduation, I intend to continue a focus on language advocacy and linguistic rights, as well as involve myself in work around language and trauma and communication development. I am grateful for the opportunity to continue this work as a student with the support and structure as a recipient of the Nattinger Scholarship.