Leverhulme Research Fellow
University of St Andrews
St Andrews, United Kingdom
[email protected]

I am interested in how languages and global media are used for the (re)production of certain viewpoints on political and epistemological issues. In this regard, I have analyzed the emergence of a form of post-political internationalism in print and digital media in the constructed language Esperanto, exploring the way the Esperanto youth media have both embraced and censored debates on imperialism and post-colonialism since the Cold War period. My interest in Esperanto and media has developed since my previous project (2015-2021), in which I conducted online and face-to-face fieldwork in France on how Esperanto gained prominence among alter-globalization activists participating in street protests such as the Gilets jaunes and among young programmers advocating for open-source software.

More recently, I have focused on digital media to understand multilingualism, authorship, and knowledge co-production online. This includes analyzing the attribution of the airplane to different inventors on Wikipedias in English, French and Portuguese. I take an ethnographic analysis of online platforms based on user-generated content as an entryway to challenge conventional depictions of open collaboration projects as unproblematically global and multilingual.

I am also Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (Netherlands/USA) and member of the Editorial Board of the journals Language Problems and Language Planning and Esperantologio / Esperanto Studies. In line with my commitment to multilingualism in academia, I have published and communicated my research outcomes in several languages.

Areas of Interest

• Language ideologies
• Multilingualism on digital media
• Social movements and linguistic justice
• The political economy of global languages
• Post-colonialism and media
• France and francophone spaces

Relevant Publications

Links to my publications are available on my University of St Andrews Profile Page.

• Fians, Guilherme. 2023. The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough. Critique of Anthropology 43:2, 167-184.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2023. O que falar em esperanto quer dizer: Revisitando políticas prefigurativas, movimentos sociais e as novas esquerdas [What it means to speak Esperanto: Revisiting prefigurative politics, social movements, and the new left]. Mana – Estudos de Antropologia Social 29:1, 1-31.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2022. What can the subaltern speak about? American Anthropologist, Online Series Call for Complaints: Colonial Hauntings, 1-3.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2022. Prefigurative Politics. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology 1, 1-18.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2022. Bringing constructed languages back to the debate: The contributions of interlinguistics to general linguistics. Investigationes Linguisticae 46, 43-52.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2022. Kontraŭ la esceptismo de Esperanto(logio): Unuapaŝa etnografia aliro al tiu studkampo [Against the exceptionalism of Esperanto (and Esperanto Studies): First steps towards an ethnography of this research field]. Esperantologio / Esperanto Studies 3:11, 108-131.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2021. Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community. Cham/London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2021. Building community through hospitality: Diffuse obligations to reciprocate in a transnational speech community. Ethnography, Online First, 1-20.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2020. Mind the age gap: Communication technologies and intergenerational language transmission among Esperanto speakers in France. Language Problems and Language Planning 44:1, 87-108.
• Fians, Guilherme. 2018. Die Neutralität einer politischen Partei: Sprachpolitik und Aktivismus für Esperanto in den Wahlen zum Europäischen Parlament [The neutrality of a political party: Language policies and activism for Esperanto in the European Parliamentary elections]. Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Interlinguistik 2018, 11-33.
• Pita, Fernando; Fians, Guilherme (Eds). 2017. O Esperanto Além da Língua [Esperanto Beyond the Language]. Porto Velho: Temática.