Narrating and Negotiating Identities

Our core interest in this course is migrants' and refugees' storytelling and in the representations of migrants, approached through different perspectives: legal/bureaucratic, media and cultural/artistic. In all these cases, narratives become a vital issue, and a complex one since narratives are normally shared, translated, brokered cross-culturally and/or often misunderstood, contested, repurposed and subjected to multiple entextualizations. These entextualizations may end up misrepresenting them, deliberately or otherwise. In particular, the documentation of the self emerges as a need in both the artistic and the administrative contexts, giving rise to different narratives adopting diversified registers, tone, tools and codes depending on the kind of constraints which apply. A detailed, well-contextualised, adequately supported and engaging narrative is a knowledge base both in cultural/artistic endeavours and in asylum seeking proceedings, amongst other things, though what counts as such may differ depending on the circumstances in which it occurs.
The purpose of the course consists in making the students aware of a) the linguistic and cultural aspects of different kinds of narrations, specifically from an intercultural perspective; b) the tools and codes that are normally used and can be successfully exploited to reach the envisaged communicative aims; c) the multiple difficulties or the processes of mediation and translation involved in the act of telling one's own story; d) the ways that have been devised to address and overcome these difficulties.
The students will be offered opportunities to analyse different case studies, so as to provide them with a reasonably articulated toolkit to approach migration narratives in their broadest sense. They will be expected to engage with different methodological tools, since the course is located at the cross-currents of Linguistic Studies, Translation/Interpreting Studies and Comparative Cultural Studies.

By the end of the course, students should successfully be able to:
1. Show awareness of the different kinds of narratives, in terms of purpose, structure, organization and impact.
2. Critically examine and question literature and data concerning migrants' narratives for legal/bureaucratic purposes.
3. Critically examine different texts and narratives belonging to the field of art and culture.
4. Prove able to compare them, working and thinking across disciplines.
5. Show awareness of the ways in which the words and bodies of the migrants become texts and language through mechanism that are often out of their control.
6. Appreciate the relevance of translation and interpreting, as well as the complexities of the process of mediating, translating and interpreting.
7. Develop the ability to apply theoretical skills to practical case studies.