Delila Omerbasic

Summer 2013 Fellow

Delila Omerbasic was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina and moved to Philadelphia, PA in 1994. She received her bachelor’s degree in Economics (2001) and master’s degrees in Liberal Arts (2004) and Education (2008) from the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in Education, Culture and Society (ECS) at the University of Utah.  Her research interests include literacy practices, digital multimodal literacies, and refugee education. She is currently working on her dissertation and focusing on how several young women who were resettled as refugees engage with multimodal literacy practices in digital spaces.  This study is grounded in critical sociocultural theory of literacy and draws on elements of postcolonial feminist theory, postmodern geography, and cultural studies. Her goal is to better understand how language is used in digital spaces for complex negotiations of identity, agency, and various social dimensions of power. This research, which builds on the emerging literature on digital experiences of transnational youth, is being conducted at a local refugee community center and will be completed in summer 2013.