Jessica McDaid is a PhD Candidate at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Her project, supervised by Dr Eva Codó, is a critical multi-sited ethnography of (pre)adolescents (aged 11-16) across the middle-class spectrum coming from various parts of Spain who uproot to Northern Ireland for a year to be immersed in local, state-funded boarding schools for English language socialisation purposes.Her thesis examines ideologies of English and immersion language socialisation among parents who invest in these products in dialogue with how their teenage children experience them, by paying particular attention to the roles class, gender, and affect play in this. Specifically, I draw on the voices of Spanish (pre)adolescents abroad to understand what doing English immersion in a ‘total institution’ (Goffman, 1961) looks and sounds like, and how this is lived, first hand, by this youth over the course of their stay. She holds an MA in Advanced English Studies (Multilingualism and Acquisition of English) and a BA in English Studies, both at UAB. She has been teaching in the undergraduate English Studies programme at the Department of English and German at UAB since 2017. She is now a visiting researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles under the supervision of Prof. Jürgen Jaspers.
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