Jolanta Drzewiecka

Jolanta Drzewiecka (PhD, Arizona State University, USA) researches discursive constructions of cultural, racial, and national differences and identities to advance a critical intercultural communication framework. She focuses on two areas: immigrant identity and public memories. In the first, she examines migrant identities, processes of integration and immigrant discourses. Here, she explores how relations of inequality shape and are shaped by practices and social relations, including affective practices, and their implications for understanding 'integration.' The latter area explores how public memories are shaped by and shape national discourses. She is particularly interested in how memories of ethnic violence are discursively disabled and blocked and victims rendered unrecognisable to protect fictions of the national self. Here, she combines discourse and rhetorical analyses with psychoanalytic theories.

She has published her research in journals such Communication Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Media Studies in Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

She is the Principal Investigator of the SNSF project "Relational integration in place: affect and power in everyday practices."

Prof. Drzewiecka moved to Switzerland after teaching and conducting research at Washington State University, USA. 

Current funded research project: Relational integration in place: affect and power in everyday practices (SNSF)

The project advances the understanding of migrant integration by focusing on social relations in concrete places. In distinction from prior studies of how specific groups of migrants achieve ‘integration,’ we examine ‘relational integration’ as processual, mundane, varied and diffused across various practices and relations among people of varying lengths of residence. Recent research shows that exclusions at national and local levels lead migrants to search for belonging in online places. Other studies show how migrants develop attachment and engage in homemaking in local places where they might feel belonging in the face of national exclusions. However their claims to place lead to conflicting emotions from long term residents. Studies show that intercultural contact in various places can lead to conviviality and inclusion as well as avoidance, exclusions and negative feelings. This project brings together these different research strands and aims to shed light on their conflicting results by examining how emotional attachments and senses of belonging in neighbourhoods are negotiated through everyday practices and social relations. Instead of focusing on any particular group or a local project, we take a neighbourhood wide approach and examine patterning of relations, practices and emotions. The project is multidisciplinary and based in theories of affect, emotion regulation, intercultural contact, and everyday practices. Few studies address intercultural contact in ‘smaller’ cities where forms of diversity are more limited. We will thus focus on neighbourhoods in ‘smaller' locations in Ticino, Switzerland. This project employs qualitative ethnographic and affective methods.

PhD student and Research Assistant Position call  

Current SNSF Agora project: Fostering inclusion of refugees (SNSF) 

Completed funded project: Migrant belonging: identity, affect and capital (SNSF)