Fresh off winning UWA’s 2025 Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, PhD candidate Lucia Fraiese has returned from a highly productive research visit to the UK, an experience that has deeply enriched her doctoral work and expanded her future research horizons.
Supported by the Sue Baker Convocation Postgraduate Research Travel Award and the Graduate Women WA Child Development Scholarship, Lucia spent September 2025 engaging with some of the world’s most prominent sociolinguists. Her visit strengthened not only the final stages of her thesis but also the foundations of a broader research program centred on linguistic diversity, identity, and community-engaged inquiry.
Connecting with Leading Scholars
During her visit, Lucia met with internationally recognised experts in sociolinguistics and language inequality, including:
- Professor Emma Moore (University of Sheffield)
- Professor Julia Snell (University of Leeds)
Both scholars are renowned for their work on language, social inequality, and the stigma attached to non-standard English varieties—topics that closely align with Lucia’s commitment to ethnographic research with First Nations youth in Australia.
She also held in-depth discussions at the University of Oxford with:
- Professor Miriam Meyerhoff (All Souls College, Oxford) and
- Professor Sali Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
to explore findings from her doctoral research: a sociolinguistic ethnography of First Nations youth in a boarding school context. Their feedback sharpened the theoretical framing of her thesis and helped her envision how this work could evolve into a long-term research agenda.
Sharing Her Work on the International Stage
Lucia presented her research at two major academic conferences:
- UK Language Variation and Change 15 (Lancaster University)
Poster: “So we was goin’ kangaroo shooting”: was/were variation in Australian Aboriginal English - British Association of Applied Linguistics 58 (University of Glasgow)
Invited Paper: “She is not white, she is Latina”: Positionality as an asset in cross-cultural ethnographic research with First Nations youth in Australia
These presentations expanded Lucia’s international network and sparked new directions for future collaborative work.
Strengthening Theory, Methodology, and Future Pathways
Across institutional visits, conferences, and informal conversations, Lucia gained new analytic tools for examining how linguistic forms encode stance, emotion, and socio-pragmatic meaning. She received valuable feedback on one of the central questions of her thesis: whether Aboriginal English is best conceptualised as an ethnolect or a stylistic repertoire. Her discussions with Professor Julia Snell also opened avenues for bridging sociolinguistic research with educational practice.
These insights have meaningfully deepened the theoretical rigour of her work—and will shape her postdoctoral research into linguistic resources, identity, agency, and belonging for First Nations youth. They have also been instrumental in reinforcing Lucia’s commitment to community-driven, ethically grounded, decolonial methodologies.
Lucia’s UK research visit has not only strengthened her thesis but also laid the groundwork for a vibrant, community-engaged research career. We are incredibly proud of her achievements at the UWA Data Institute, and excited to follow the next steps in her journey.
Watch Video Here https://vimeo.com/1117985745
