Role
Dr. Höfler is Lecturer in Intercultural Communication. She is 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.
Concha's current work centres on how institutions shape belonging and identification, with a second strand on trauma, resilience, and agency, focusing on narratives of resilience and the social connections that make resilience possible.
Sponsors and collaborators
Heinrich Böll Foundation
Volkswagen Foundation
DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service)
Publications
2023. "how Germany determines what ‘being German’ means in the post-Soviet space”, in Anna Flack, Jan Musekamp, Jannis Panagiotidis, Hans-Christian Petersen (eds.) Russian Germans on Four Continents, Lanham: Lexington.
2021. “Ethnisierungsprozesse und Grenzen“, in Dominik Gerst, Maria Klessmann, Hannes Krämer (eds.) Grenzforschung. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Forschung, p. 320-337, Nomos. With Maria Klessmann.
2021. “Ambiguities of space and place: making sense of the rural/urban divide in interaction”, in Arianna Maiorani, Bruna Mancini (Hg.) Space Intersections: Cross-Disciplinary Encounters in Narrative Places, 45-63, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. With Dominik Gerst, Rita Vallentin.
2020. Boundaries and Belonging in the Greek Community of Georgia, Series: Border Studies. Cultures, Spaces, Orders. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
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.