Elizabeth Peacock

My research draws upon linguistic, sociocultural, and political anthropology to investigate nation-building as it touches on youth and the ideologies of language they learn and adopt. I am in the process of drafting a book-length manuscript, "Emerging from the 2nd World: Class, Language, and Migration among the First Generation of Postsocialism," based upon my doctoral project, conducted in 2006-2007. At that time, I collected ethnographic and linguistic data among eighth and ninth graders at two public secondary schools in L'viv, Ukraine in order to examine how political change and generational experiences shape Ukrainian teenagers' attitudes towards postsocialist transformations, socioeconomic differences, and migration. My analysis suggests that, though these young people never experienced socialism, their imaginings of socialist, postsocialist, and non-socialist spaces and times play an important role in the construction of their age-based, national, gendered, and class identities. In the coming year, I will conduct follow-up interviews with participants in order to study the extent to which the global economic crisis, Euro Cup 2012, and significant life changes have shifted their positions on emigration and the value of foreign languages.

I will extend this research in my next project, "Skyping Home: Language Use and Global Communication among Ukrainian Migrants in Europe," which will examine how young people use global forms of communication to establish and maintain connections within transnational communities. In this project, I seek to investigate the linguistic practices used in these modes of communication and to what extent language is a benefit or a hindrance for migrants and their families back home.