Andrea Sunyol

I am a Senior Teaching Fellow in Applied Linguistics at the department of Culture, Communication and Media, where I teach and supervise dissertations at the MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. My research is centered around the discursive and semiotic construction of social inequality in education from a critical ethnographic perspective. I explore the role of language in the educational strategies and practices of dominant social classes, by asking questions like how does language operate as a mechanism of distinction, or how it contributes to widen social stratification. My PhD thesis looked into how internationality was socially constructed in two elite schools in the area of Barcelona. I am a member of the research group CIEN (UAB), which studies multilingualism from a critical sociolinguistic point of view.

My work has appeared in books published by Routledge (Interrogating the Capitalization of Language; Language, Governmentality and Neoliberalism). I have also published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2019), Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana (2017, 2019, forthcoming), or the Journal of Language and Law (2021). Before joining the UCL’s IoE, I taught at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the University of Southampton and the University of Edinburgh. Together with Peter Browning (UCL), I share my thoughts on Language, Education and Inequality at https://encounterspodcast.wordpress.com.