This project involves the dissertation research of a cultural anthropology student from the University of California Los Angeles. The project investigates how children growing up in a multicultural setting (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain) use communication as a way to create, resist or contest new identities and social roles as cancer patients. Using methods of micro-ethnography, qualitative cross-sectional study of 20 children and longitudinal study of four children, the student will study the children's use of both verbal and non-verbal communication in three discursive practices, teasing, joking and concealing. The project will examine how children negotiate and transform their Catalan and Spanish identities and social roles imposed by parents and caregivers in the context of their life-in the cancer ward of a hospital. The project will advance our understanding of bilingualism as well as communication of emotion in this institutional setting, will bridge linguistic and medical methodologies by examining emotion, in particular pain not only as a subjective phenomenon/experience but also as an intersubjective experience emerging in interaction. Finally, the project contributes to the ethnography of children, who are relatively unstudied, advances our knowledge of this region of the world, and contributes to the training of a young social scientist.
