“I still want to travel, know more places and be stressed about other kinds of documents. It’s part of it. It’s part of being a migrant”
Heidi is from São Paulo, Brazil, but her name could take you back to your childhood when you were watching the 1974 Japanese animated series set in the Swiss Alps. A series that Heidi’s mum liked so much to decide to name her daughter after its main character. Similarly, also her surname comes from overseas as her maternal great-grandfather was Italian, from Genoa.
In Brazil, Heidi graduated in Social Communication with a specialization in Media Studies, a bachelor’s degree that prepared students to work in tv and cinema. A sector she worked in for a year to later understand that she wanted to keep on studying. She applied for a master’s and was accepted, but the decision to cut fellowships of the newly elected President Bolsonaro affected her possibility to study. She found a job in the communication department of the university that she enjoyed and did also during the covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, she was also very unhappy back then and lived a period of depression. She needed to go back studying and she bravely decided that it was up to her to determine her future. She applied to eight master programs in different countries and was accepted by the University of Tartu, in Estonia, for a master’s degree in Semiotics. A programme she had always wanted to do and that was fully covered by a tuition waiver. The only option she could to gradually get out of her situation, “it made me better and led me to a better life”.
Winters in Estonia are very hard as temperatures can drop to -25°C, a unique experience. During a conference she met a prominent professor in her field that today is the supervisor of her MSCA (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions) doctorate in Turin, Italy.
“Coming here was a dream come true because it fits everything I wanted. A warmer place, a language that I can learn, a project under a professor I admire and it’s also the roots from my family”.
To be a Marie Curie fellow, is a prestigious position part of a research group created and financed by the European Union. With the letter of invitation of her professor, obtaining her visa in Brazil was easy, “but once I arrived here, that meant nothing. Nobody wanted to know how prestigious my scholarship was”. As all immigrants, Heidi was not spared from the clash with the Italian bureaucracy. She received her first residency permit after nine months, which was valid for ten, and then received an appointment for its renewal four months after it expired. A time frame that is especially problematic for her as to be a Marie Curie fellow means to travel a lot for conferences, even outside of the Schengen area.
“The residency permit is a huge headache that never ends as they refuse to give us for more than ten months. A stress that brings you down and takes a toll”
Conflictual information made her once waste three days in bureaucratic procedures at the police headquarters. A place where the less you stay, the better it feels given the stress of waiting, the poor organization and the discomfort and anger people experience. A situation that neither her, nor her friends experienced in other European countries. On the contrary, in Italy Heidi was able to benefit from public healthcare and unexpectedly discover that she would not have to pay for the medical services and treatments received.
In her research within VORTEX (Coping with the Varieties of Radicalization into Terrorism and Extremism) Doctoral Network, Heidi analyses conspiracy theories, particularly those relating to Big Pharma and Eurabia.
“Conspiracy theories are a straightforward mechanism with which people look at the world and understand reality, because right now it is really difficult to understand”.
As a semiotician, her goal is to perform qualitative analysis of the enormous amount of data she collects from Telegram, the only platform that allows her to extract user data, texts, and images which means she has to join groups where hateful comments are the norm. The most challenging aspect of her job. According to Heidi, when a text becomes a mere set of data, much of the context is lost. Instead, by introducing more semiotic analysis into big social data analysis, she aims to understand such discourses to analyse and address them. Her project involves using Machine Learning techniques to analyse the big data she has access to, but lacking knowledge in this field, she has had difficulty collecting and analysing data and managing her Telegram account. A problem she solved thanks to a collaboration with a researcher from the department of Computer Science of the University of Turin, which proved to be mutually beneficial. In conspiracy theories, it is the way information is disseminated and used that makes it manipulative and dangerous. That is why “we’re not going to fix the social problems without addressing the technological architecture that makes everything possible. We have to marry these fields”. Finally, part of her work is to publish her research on the project’s blog and social media channels, a request that directly comes from the EU.
To be a Marie Curie fellow means to have a lot of pressure and expectations, to edit a great number of reports, to constantly present your research and results and much more. Both lessons and seminars of her PhD are in Italian and even if she understands it quite well on a conversational level, “for research in humanities and academic discussions in semiotics it is very challenging”. Not being able to participate in discussions saddens her, but her colleagues are very nice, speak English and include both her and the other international students. Knowing Italian would also make her personal life easier yet she thinks that her difficulties to learn it, are also linked to an unconscious block that comes from all that she has been through.
Heidi is not considering staying longer in Italy as, even if being a migrant is hard even when you choose it, she still has some energy left to explore.
“I still want to travel and know more places and be stressed about other kinds of documents. It’s part of it. It’s part of being a migrant”.
She misses her family and friends in Brazil but to live in Italy made her feel very connected to her heritage especially in Genoa, the city from where her great-grandfather left from, to never come back. Her family has always been considered the weird family of the little Italian community of São Paulo. Her grandmother spoke broken Portuguese and got laughed at, and her great-grandfather never learnt it. But living here has enabled her to see where everything came from, from the way of speaking and gesticulating to the scarpetta, a “poor people thing” in Brazil.