Zoom Lecture: The Migration of Albanians to Greece and Ensuing Xenophobic Discourses with Rexhina Ndoci -- Ohio State University

CSEEES Graduate Student Lecture: Rexhina Ndoci

The Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (CSEEES) is pleased to announce that Rexhina Ndoci (PhD Candidate at the Department of Linguistics) will present the second of our 2022 Spring Semester Graduate Student Lectures. 

In her lecture Rexhina will explore how the migration of Albanians to Greece in the early 1990s led to intense xenophobic discourses that led to Albanians being engraved in the Greek consciousness as “cunning”, “primitive”, “untrustworthy”, “dangerous” and “criminal” especially through the creation and use of internet memes in later years. She will discuss two closely related studies, an analysis of Greek internet memes and a perception experiment which examine the L2 Greek of Albanian migrants and the social evaluations of that variety. She argues that memes can be a valuable window into the public perception of the features that seem to characterize the speech of migrant communities. The anonymity that the nature of memes offers to their creators, by being transmitted and shared with few, if any, restrictions, facilitates the inclusion of content that can be harmful to vulnerable groups such as migrants by perpetuating existing stereotypes about them. 

About the Speaker

Rexhina Ndoci is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Linguistics of The Ohio State University. Prior to joining Ohio State, she completed her BA in English and Greek Languages and Literatures at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research is situated in the field of sociolinguistics with a particular focus on language and its relationship to ethnic identity. Her dissertation, which is highly related to this talk, focuses on the linguistic construction of Albanianness in Greece and the social perception of Albanian-accented Greek. In her research she employs experimental, discourse analytic, and ethnographically informed methods. At Ohio State she teaches undergraduate sociolinguistics courses, and introductory linguistics courses at the Summer Linguistic Institute for Youth Scholars, the Linguistics department’s summer camp for high schoolers. Rexhina is also a Research Assistant in the Laboratory for Greek Dialectology in her home department where, under the supervision of the lab director Dr. Brian D. Joseph, she is involved in a project examining the Greek of South Albania and the linguistic practices of Greek-Albanian bilinguals of the same area.