Jacqueline Urla

language activism, minority languages, linguistic anthropology

My research integrates Foucault, Bourdieu, and Fanon in the study of language as a field of politics and resistance.  I have conducted long-term ethnographic research in the Basque region on language activism and am the author of Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation, and Cultural Activism (2012). In the last decade, I have been collaborating with a variety of research teams from Catalonia, Galicia, and other parts of Europe examining the political effects of language and how and why people decide to become new speakers of minority languages. More recently, I’ve started an intimate ethnography of the historical memory movement of Francoist repression in Spain.