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Concha Maria Höfler

Senior Lecturer

School of Arts & Humanities

Staff Group(s)
Academic Division Arts and Humanities

Role

Dr. Höfler is Lecturer in Intercultural Communication. She is interim course leader for the MA in International Development and leads modules on the MA and across the Global Studies (Joint Honours) programme.

Career overview

Before joining NTU in October 2019, Dr. Höfler worked as Postdoctoral Research Associate at Durham University, and at the Viadrina Center  B/Orders in Motion in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. While working towards her PhD, she was a Teaching and Research Fellow at European University Viadrina.

Research areas

Concha uses linguistic ethnography to study interaction, especially the negotiation of belonging, processes of (un)making social boundaries, and narrative. She has explored interactional boundary work in the Greek community of Georgia for her PhD, and narratives of complex belongings in the German communities in the post-Soviet space.

She is also interested in discourses and processes of societal transformations, participation, and activism in post-Soviet countries, particularly in Georgia and the Southern Caucasus.

Sponsors and collaborators

Heinrich Böll Foundation

Volkswagen Foundation

DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service)

Publications

(forthcoming, 2020) (Un)Making Boundaries in the Greek Community of Georgia, Series: Border Studies. Cultures, Spaces, Orders. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

(forthcoming, 2020) “Grenzen und Ethnizität“, in Dominik Gerst, Maria Klessmann, Hannes Krämer (eds.) Handbuch Grenzforschung, Nomos. With Maria Klessmann.

(accepted) “Ambiguities of space and place: making sense of the rural/urban divide”, in Arianna Maiorani, Bruna Mancini, Eleonora Rao (eds.) Space Intersections: Cross-Disciplinary Encounters in Narrative Places, Palgrave. With Dominik Gerst, Rita Vallentin.

2019 “Establishing the end of the Soviet Union as a temporal boundary. Perspectives from Georgia’s Greek community”, Working Paper Series B/Orders in Motion, Frankfurt (Oder): Viadrina.

2018 “Positioning the self in talk about groups: Linguistic means emphasizing veracity used by members of the Georgian Greek community”, in Kate Beeching, Chiara Ghezzi, Piera Molinelli (eds.) Positioning the Self and Others: Social Indexicality and Identity Construction, 285-305, Amsterdam/New York: Benjamins.

2018 “Language competence ‘desirable’ – insights into changing attitudes towards language competence as a feature of belonging in Georgia's Greek community”, in Mounir Guirat (ed.) Politics and Poetics of Belonging, 150-168, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

2016 “Group belonging beyond language boundaries – Language, religion and identity in the multilingual Greek community of Georgia”, Language Typology and Universals 69(2): 213–234.