Faced with travel restrictions and recent conference cancellations due to concerns about COVID-19, we were very lucky to have the opportunity to participate last weekend at the 24th annual SCFLLF conference, held at USF’s beautiful St Petersburg campus.

Our own Linguistics and Language Studies (LALS) doctoral students, Yaqian Jiang, Antonella Gazzardi and Anna Stepanyan (pictured below, L to R) presented their research on digital discourse.

Yaqian’s study explored Chinese social media users’ reactions on Weibo, following Italian designers’ Dolce & Gabbana’s controversial 2018 ad campaign in China. Antonella’s presentation examined Italian tourists’ epistemic and affective stancetaking in their TripAdvisor reviews of Italian restaurants in the U.S. that are marketed as “authentically Italian.” Anna’s research focused on various forms of political alignment and disalignment in Armenian users’ posts on YouTube.