Dr Korina Giaxoglou

Professional biography

I am Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language at the Open University’s School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, within the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies.

Parallel to my undergraduate study in French Language & Literature graduate at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, I was involved in the Athens-based theatre collectives Mythologia (Dir. Yorghos Biniaris) and Schedia (Dir. Vassilis Kanellopoulos) and worked at K. Nitsos’ archive ‘THEATRO’. I then moved to the UK to pursue postgraduate studies in linguistics and was awarded an MA in Applied Linguistics with Distinction from Birkbeck University, before moving on to gain a doctorate in (Modern Greek) Sociolinguistics from King’s College London funded by the Greek State Scholarship foundation and supervised by Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Professor David Ricks. My thesis proposed a sociolinguistic framework for understanding Maniat laments as ethnopoetic narratives, based on the analysis of their entextualisation in an unpublished manuscript collection compiled by my grandfather, Yagos Strilakos and other published collections.

From 2007 to 2016, I taught a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the English Language and Communication programme, the MA in Applied Linguistics and the MA in Media- and Communication at Kingston University. I have also taught modules at Goldsmiths University and King’s College London and am regularly invited to offer guest lectures for students in other universities in the UK and abroad on my research in discourse and narrative analysis.

I hold a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching from Kingston University (with Distinction) and I am Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). I have been serving as a member on the Editorial Board for the journal Discourse, Context and Media and the Steering Group on the International Death Online Research Network and have served as the Secretary of the BAAL Special Interest Group Language & New Media (2019-2022). I am regularly invited in public events to talk about matters of death in a digital age, including for events organised by the Wellcome Collection and Marie Curie Charity.

Research interests

My research focuses on narrative and affect across different contexts. My approach is interdisciplinary, crossing and bridging theories, concepts, and methods from a range of fields, including socially & culturally-oriented linguistics, social & linguistic anthropology, critical folkloristics, media & cultural studies, socio-narrative studies, and death, grief & bereavement studies. Drawing on narrative practice research (see De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2020) and the small stories research paradigm (see Georgakopoulou 2007, Georgakopoulou, Giaxoglou and Patron 2023), my research contributes theoretical and methodological insights into narrative (socio)linguistics, an emerging subfield broadly concerned with the sociocultural, creative, affective and political dimensions of storytelling practices across ‘traditional’, contemporary digital, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) contexts.

My PhD thesis investigated Maniat laments, known locally as mirolóyia (μοιρολόγια), a culture-specific verbal art in Inner Mani, South Peloponnese, Greece. Applying a narrative sociolinguistic approach complemented by an ethnographic perspective, my work has contributed an innovative understanding of this verbal art genre as a mode of ethnopoetic narrativisation of personal experience of loss that provides lamenters with a general framework for performing and sharing their pain within and beyond rituals of death. My analysis of the entextualisation of fragments of laments in written folklore collections has also pointed to the practices of literarisation of Maniat laments and the literisation of the local dialect, enabling their decontextualization oriented to a literate, middle-class national readership.

Based on this work, I led the academic research and compilation of case for the inclusion of the Maniat lament within the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which implements UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The case was submitted by the Institute of Sparta in collaboration with the Municipality of Southern Mani to the Directorate of Modern Cultural Assets and Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports and was approved in July 2024.

Following on from my PhD thesis, I turned her attention to practices of sharing grief in digital contexts which were at the time only just emerging. My research has been providing new understandings of social media mourning as small stories which afford, but also constrain different degrees of proximity to or distance from the event of death, networked audiences and one’s own negotiation of the range of emotions at the face of loss. My research culminated in the publication of my research monograph entitled: A narrative approach to social media mourning: small stories and affective positioning (2021, Routledge) followed by the creation of a public engagement interactive experience on how social media has changed the way we share grief (Open Learn).

My research on narrative and affect practices in ‘traditional’ and digital contexts has led to a call for extending narrative frameworks for the study of positioning (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008) to encompass aspects of affect. I have put forward a distinctive new framework for the situated analysis of affective performances as acts of affective positioning that are emergent in narrative practices and are closely interlinked with the construction of self, identities and relations with others. I have been continuing to develop this framework by applying it in the study of voice and visibility in curated migrant storytelling in charity campaigns together with Dr Tereza Spilioti (University of Cardiff), Dr Sofia Lampropoulou (University of Liverpool) and Paige Johnson (University of Liverpool), forging a critical storytelling approach to the mobilisation of stories in contemporary public domains.

I am also involved in a collective on politics and creativity in the linguistic landscape with Philip Seargeant and Frank Monaghan. We have been documenting and analysing practices of heritage-making (heritagisation) in the linguistic landscape in the case of Blue and Black Blue Plaques in London.

I co-supervise research projects in the areas of education and social media sharing (see below for a list of past and current doctoral students):

Dimitris Vogiatzis (PhD): “The use of social media platforms for foreign language learning in adult and community education” (awarded, 2022)

Fatima Khaled (EdD): “Implementing a project-based approach on Arabic Heritage Language Learners: Creativity, Motivation, Learner agency and identity” (awarded, 2024 submitted)

Leo Havemann (PhD): “Valuing open: the purpose and value of open educational practices in higher education institutional policy”

Nikos Papadopoulos (PhD, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki): “Η πραγμάτωση της αφήγησης στο σχολικό και εξωσχολικό περιβάλλον: νέα αφηγηματική πραγματικότητα, εφηβικές πρακτικές γραμματισμού και γλωσσική εκπαίδευση”/ “The enactment of narrative in the school and extracurricular context: new narrative reality, young adult literacy practices, and language education” (co-supervision with Professor Dimitris Koutsogiannis and Dr Mariza Georgalou). 

Students interested in working in any area of narrative sociolinguistics, social media studies, linguistic landscapes or eager to conduct interdisciplinary research in the areas of digital death, mourning, memory, and heritage or digital narrative practices in educational contexts are welcome to get in touch.

Research Groups

·       

I am a member of the following research groups at the Open University:

·       - Health Communication Research Group and Open Societal Challenge (co-lead with Marion Nao)

·       - Existential Dis/Connections Open Societal Challenge

·       - Applied Linguistics and English Language Research Group

·       - Language, Literature & Politics Research Group

·       - Open Discourse Net

·       - Open Thanatology