Pilar Blitvich Publishes New Book
The Department of English is happy to announce the publication of Professor Pilar Blitvich’s new book Evaluating identities online: Case studies from the Spanish speaking world (see attachment below). Pilar co-edited this timely collection of essays with Patricia Bou-Franch (Universitat de Valencia) and co-authored one of its chapters. The volume is published by Palgrave. Congratulations Pilar!
This book examines how identities are constructed in digital, multimodal discourse, and how these identities (gender, age, race, ethnicity, professional, etc.) are generally evaluated as they are claimed, attributed, verified, and non-verified intersubjectively in a polymedia space. Although the construction of online identity has been addressed in the literature, the online construction of identity in the Spanish speaking world has received less focused attention. This volume contains chapters by renowned specialists in pragmatics and digital communication and is the most recent output of an ongoing externally funded project (UPO-1380703). The book includes a state-of-the-art introduction by the editors followed by three main sections: the first is devoted to examining digital identifies in conflict; the second addresses self-presentation on Twitter and Instagram, with a special focus on politics and gender; and finally, the third addresses identity construction in the genre of online reviews. All the chapters address self and other identity construction in contexts of both convergence and controversy, in a variety of digital social platforms and practices related to gender, age, political stance, race, ethnicity, and lifestyle. Further, many of the chapters approach identity construction from a contrastive perspective, and thus address variation. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, graduate, and advanced undergraduate students in sociolinguistics, (contrastive) pragmatics, discourse analysis, media studies, linguistic anthropology, and communication studies, among others.