In summer 2019, I travelled to my home country, Colombia, thanks to a CLACLS Summer Travel Fellowships. It provided me with the resources to do archival work in Bogota, as well as to draft a paper for my second exam and to outline a presentation for an international conference. As a graduate student working in the field of critical sociolinguist, one of my current topic of interest revolves around collective writing and authorship as a social process where political struggles are disguised as debates around language. In this vein, my project focused on the writing process of the Colombian Constitution in 1991. My research draws upon a well documented cultural history in which language and conservative hegemony are deeply intertwined since the end of the XIX century in Colombia. As a result of the archival work and the time devoted to its analysis, I drafted a first version of my paper for my second exam and I also attended an international conference in São Paulo, Brazil (The IV Congreso Latinoamericano de Glotopolítica November 2-4, 2019), where I presented some of my findings.

The Covid-19 pandemic obliged me to shift to online research because I had to cancel my plan to do in person archival work in Bogota. Therefore, during the 2020 Summer, and thanks to the Summer Travel Fellowship offered by CLACLS, I focused on developing a plan for online archival research. I narrowed down the sources and data that I will use for two chapters of mydissertation based on their availability and accessibility through the internet. Furthermore, the current situation also led me to include the challenges posited by the halt of our “normal” lifestyle in my methodological framework. As I’m researching collective writing of key political texts in contemporary Colombian history, I have come across new trends of debates around the limitations and constraints of the physical archive in the context of globalized and intensively technological construction of national and transnational narratives of belonging beyond formal democracy. The pandemic also brought new light to my understanding of how digital communication has shaped political discourse and debates almost everywhere in the last decade. This reflection opened a new venue in my research to revisit taking for granted differences between oral and textual realizations of language in the public sphere.