Wafa Al-Alawi

I am a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. I focus on the discursive construction of bi/multilingual identities using primarily scalar and chronotopic approaches to discourse analysis. I am also interested in multilingualism and the role of Arabic(s) in contemporary globalization. My dissertation focuses on sociolinguistic phenomena in Bahraini youth and the multitude of anxieties that shape their discourses regarding their varied bilingual capacities and behaviors as well as the role social class plays in access to and sentiments towards English in such a bilingual, globalized context.