ברכות לברנדון אפשטיין, סטודנט במסלול הדוקטורט

על פרסום הפרק "English as “the gay comfort zone” of hybrid youth identities"
כחלק מהספר "The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture"

וכך מספר ברנדון על עצמו, המחקר שערך והפרק שנכתב בעקבותיו:
"I'm Brandon, a fifth year PhD student under Dr. Gilly Hartal (Bar-Ilan University) and Dr. Tommaso M. Milani (The Pennsylvania State University). I made Aliyah from Paris in 2018, though I'm originally from Boston (US). My research explores Israeli queer youth and their discursive practices and constructions of their hybrid linguistic, sexual, and national identities. Through their narratives and language ideologies, I problematize current legal policies--like the controversial Nation State Law (Knesset, 2018)--regarding citizenship as well as curricular and pedagogical materials to locate representations of queerness within Israel and its classrooms. When not researching, I teach English and French to middle and high school students on a youth village in Hertzaliya; I'm also a homeroom teacher there. The chapter, published in The Routledge Handbook for Language and Youth Culture (Svdensen and Jonsson, 2023), explores discursive constructions of sexual identity via English in the place of Hebrew and/or Arabic according to some Israeli queer youth. I used critical discourse analysis and narrative analysis to analyze ethnographic interview data with queer Israeli youth participants. Through their stories, I found that my participants used English as a borderland discourse (Blackburn, 2005) whereby English is a tool to not just explore sexual and gendered identities but also allows for queer Israeli youth to exit the socio-geopolitical "struggles" and positions that come along with Israeli citizenship and the (Zionist and masculinist) expectations thereof. This is not to say that my participants do not connect to their mother-tongue(s), they instead feel more creative and liberated when exploring their queer identities while using English, both online and off."

לקריאת הפרק המלא לחצו כאן