My name is Alfonso Sánchez-Moya and I am a doctor in English Linguistics. My thesis, defended in Amsterdam in November 2018, was the culmination of joint PhD degree between the Complutense University of Madrid and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Currently, I am a RCC postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University.
So far, my research has combined the exploration of several fields within linguistics. Embedded within Discourse Studies as the overarching approach, my thesis focused on analysing the discourse used by female survivors of Intimate Partner Violence when representing themselves and their male perpetrators in an online forum. To this end, I adopted a multi-faceted methodological framework, which moved from a more quantified analysis of the online discourse at hand (sentiment analysis) to more abstract/metaphorical realisations of these women and the perpetrators. By and large, and based on the linguistic analysis at the textual level, findings have shed light on these women’s concerns, worries and realities. My thesis was awarded the Extraordinary PhD award at the Faculty of Philology (Complutense).
Overall, my research is concerned with language and how language is used by individuals who are part of any socio-cultural scenario. I am particularly interested in online discourse and multimodal communication, mostly looking at the connections between language, ideology, power and identity. This explains why I have investigated several discourse contexts by connecting the language used therein to issues of health communication online, or gender identities. Furthermore, I am also interested in digital discourse and communication as key components of online education, fields I have been involved with in professional terms for the last ten years. Currently, I am working on the metaphorical construction of undocumented immigrants in the US.
