Sessions run on the first Monday of the month, 5:30pm-7:00pm UK time.
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This month, Donata Puntil will be sharing her work in progress in a session entitled:
Invisible Stories
This presentation, drawing on post-humanism, new materialism and autoethnography, is exploring the intra-action between the personal and the professional in language teachers’ nomadic journeys. Language(s) has the power to shape how individuals live and make their worlds as personal, local, transnational and spiritual identities are constructed through language. Under this premise, language teachers are active world-makers who move seamlessly between different linguistic and cultural worlds and who touch different physical and symbolic territories. From their experiences of diaspora, they are highly skilled at drawing on their own rich linguistic, material and spiritual resources for translating and remaking cultural concepts, but also at reframing their identities. This type of thinking brings at the same time loss from what is left behind and opportunities for new meanings and intra-actions with their encounter with new worlds. Braidotti (2011), following Delueze and Guattari (1987), would define this process as “deterritorialization”, stepping away from a notion of stability and of unity of the self and embracing relationality and uncertainty in the mapping of new territories. In this presentation I refer to language teachers’ diasporic identities not as a bounded by a linguistic group and a destination, but as members of one profession mostly defined by a nomadic movement.
Donata is a Senior Lecturer in Language & Intercultural Education and Programme Director at the Modern language Centre, King’s College London, where she is responsible for staff development and intercultural training. Donata has an extensive teaching experience in Second Language Acquisition, Intercultural Studies and Applied Linguistics, with a particular focus on using cinema and literature in language teaching. Before working at King’s College London, Donata collaborated with the University of Venice and of Rome 3 in Italy. She worked for the Italian Cultural Institute in London where she co-founded Teacher Training for Italian as a foreign language. She is currently completing a Doctorate in Education on language teachers’ professional development with a particular focus on identity and life narratives within an onto-epistemological framework broadly grounded on Posthumanism, New Materialism ad Autoethnography.
Donata is also an accredited Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, member of the BPC (British Psychoanalytic Association) and she works privately on a part-time basis as a psychotherapist in London.