Anabel Martínez, lecturer at ISSA - School of Management Assistants, was one of the 33 speakers at the international congress Culture and Its Uses as Testimonyheld at the University of Birmingham (UK) from April 10 to 13. The meeting was organized by a network of researchers whose work is funded by committee of research in Art and Humanities (AHRC) in the UK.

Professor Martinez, a member of this interdisciplinary group for a few months and Head of the subject of language and Culture of Modern language at School, presented her paper "Refugees Mediated Testimony: TED Talks" ("La mediación del testimonio de los refugiados a través del ejemplo de las charlas TED"). In her discussion paper, she analyzed the narrative strategies of the TED Talk of Nujeen Mustafa, a Syrian refugee who fled her country in conflict to Germany, where she also suffered rejection: ''In line with the work I do at group 'Emotional culture and identity' (CEMID) of the University of Navarra's Institute for Culture and Society , my research focuses on analyzing how the authors of these autobiographical accounts draw on strategic narrative empathy as a mechanism for social change."

D. in English Philology from the University of Oviedo (2010), the topic of the presented communication emerged as result from her research stay at the "Centre for Life-Writing Research" (CLWR) of King's College (London) last year: "I analyzed the digital paradigm as an opportunity to write about oneself to reach an increasingly global audience faster. In particular, I studied the cases of young women and girl human rights activists. After reading their texts, I decided to analyze their TED talks as examples of autobiographical storytelling." In the future, she would like to publish a book compiling the cases she has been studying so far, "under a single banner: how girls in non-English speaking countries, victims of human rights violation, resort to diverse strategic ways to tell their story, to appeal to a global audience and to make us aware of what is still happening in some places," she explains.