UCA

Currently, migration is posing a global challenge for the formation of societies and States, being a key factor of the feminisation of the phenomenon. When the migration process is undertaken under situations of vulnerability, it can be linked to structures that generate violence, exploitation, disappearance, and/or human trafficking. The routes that go from Central America to the USA by land present examples of these structures. The SIGNAL-LANDSCAPE project aims to: 1) Build a creative and transnational cartography that reflects the points of damage, as well as the care and resistance of the migratory route. 2) Design methods and tools that facilitate the processes of construction of the life story while avoiding re-victimisation. 3) Breaking the silencing to which the stories of migrant women are subjected, thus generating narrative results. 4) Produce academic knowledge, that will reach certain spaces for the design of policies and social networks. The Researcher will carry out a multi-sited ethnography: origin (Honduras), the route (Mexico-Guatemala), and destination (USA). In these spaces, she will work with women, through local organisations, to build creative narratives that will allow the designing of: 1) the physical landscapes that reflect the damage and care that women have experienced along the route; and 2) the geographical and social landscapes of their experiences. The researcher has doctoral experience with Nigerian migrant women, who are often linked to human trafficking, and she has developed a methodology proposal to take into account the silencing. Furthermore, the trajectory of both supervisors in the field, the Host Centres, and the support of the two Chairs: 1) UNESCO-Gender, Wellbeing and Culture of Peace, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and 2) Jean Monnet-Immigration and Borders of European, University of Cádiz, Spain, will be a fundamental contribution to the proper development of the project and the positive future of the Researcher

Assessing riverine litter input variability to the marine environment at large scale through field data collection: progress in marine litter pollution science beyond the state-of-the-art. Marine litter is a major global environmental concern and highly relevant in the political agendas and environmental policy frameworks, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals.The fact that the patterns in dynamics and distribution of riverine litter remain unknown to date underlines that LitRivus can greatly advance the field of marine litter and the global plastics issue. The project will be focused on innovative monitoring methods to study riverine litter input, providing details on dynamics and variability of litter flux in rivers, which is the missing information necessary to validate models for assessment of riverine litter loads to the sea. Empirical data will facilitate formulation of models to reduce uncertainties and improve estimations. Moreover, the use of international data from RIMMEL project (DG Joint Research Centre, European Commission) and collaboration with experts through RiLiNet will provide the project a large scale. Publication of these results will be very welcome internationally, providing a new approach to the topic based on field data, and serving larger goals pursued by the scientific community, e.g. calculation of marine litter mass balances at different geographical and temporal scales. Furthermore, this will be the first time comprehensive data on riverine litter inputs will be evaluated in relation to policy and decision-making frameworks, such as the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Water Framework Directive and the EU Strategy for plastics, thus guaranteeing that science-policy knowledge transfer is achieved in order to improve plastic mitigation measures.

This research aims to fill the gap about the 18th and 19th- Spanish and Portuguese spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, by analysing the emergence and development of their own pragmatic system in forms of address. Both languages underwent deep changes from 1700’s onwards, but these have been hardly researched although some of them affected both sides of the Atlantic. This project attempts to shed light on the arising of a politeness pronouns system that is only attested in the south-western part of the Peninsula and which does not follow the standard or any other system elsewhere in Spain and Portugal. By collecting private correspondence and juridical documents that show real language use, this investigation intends to find why this phenomenon emerged in the south-west, what type of speaker prompted or disfavoured it, what evolution it underwent until establishing itself and what linguistic behaviour it has been characterised by. Likewise, the study of this feature may also underpin the theory about a Sprachbund formed in the south-western Iberian Peninsula between Spanish and Portuguese and how its relation with America prompted common linguistic developments in both the European and American varieties. This study represents pioneering research, since more and more authors are drawing attention to the importance of the 18th and 19th centuries as turning points in the evolution of Spanish and Portuguese, and how these centuries can help understand the current state of both languages and the differences witnessed not only on both sides of the Atlantic, but also within the Iberian Peninsula.