Jolanta Drzewiecka

Jolanta Drzewiecka (PhD, Arizona State University, USA) is a professor in the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Societe at Università della Svizzerla italiana, Switzerland. She researches discursive constructions of cultural, racial, and national differences and identities to advance a critical intercultural communication framework. She focuses on two areas: immigrant identity and public memories. In the first, she examines how immigrant identities are negotiated and represented in personal and media narratives. Here, she develops a theory as to how immigrants are racially incorporated through intercultural translation in ways that sustain structures of inequality. The latter area explores how public memories are shaped by and shape nationalism. She is particularly interested in how memories of ethnic violence are discursively disabled and blocked and victims rendered unrecognisable to protect fictions of the national self. Here, she combines discourse and rhetorical analyses with psychoanalytic theories.

She has published her research in journals such Communication Theory, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Media Studies in Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

She previously taught and conducted research at Washington State University, USA. She is Academic Director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Intercultural Communication at USI, Academic Director of the European Masters of Intercultural Communication and the Vice-Director of the Institute of Communication and Public Policy.