Robin ANN Shoaps

overview of scholarship and teaching

As a linguistic anthropologist my work is broadly concerned with how language and culture mutually inform one another. My research is inherently interdisciplinary and requires mastery of methods and analytic approaches from both Linguistics and Anthropology. This facilitates many opportunities for scholarly collaboration and synergistic course offerings. In my teaching and research, I pair insights from ethnographic fieldwork with descriptive and documentary linguistics to make substantive contributions to longstanding and emerging areas of interest in both disciplines. The overarching intellectual questions that motivate my scholarship stem from the fact that people are fundamentally “moral animals” and that ethical concerns and negotiations are a central aspect of social life. Ethics and morality have typically been the domains of philosophy and psychology but I am part of a new wave of scholars who view morality as a product of webs of social relations. I bring to this topic empirical evidence of how these social relations are primarily negotiated through communicative practices. For example, approaching morality as a social fact grounded in communication and interaction has motivated me to investigate naturally occurring language use (aka “discourse”) in primarily political and religious domains. My expertise and interests are wide ranging. For example, these span from the visual rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh’s website, to the language used in Pentecostal training materials, and the way that Sakapultek Maya frame their moral authority in everyday and ritual speech. The data I collect come from extensive participant-observation fieldwork, interviews, and recordings of naturally-occurring talk among such disparate communities as mushers and Ahtna elders in Alaska; Sakapultek and K'iche' Maya in Guatemala; and conservative mass-media in the United States.

In my time at UAF, I have taught graduate and undergraduate linguistic anthropology courses as well as core classes in linguistics and cultural anthropology. The topics of my offerings have ranged from such disparate themes as the intersections between language and gender; the relationship between culture and performance; language and inequality; political media; ritual language; ethnographic and linguistics research methods; introduction to cultural anthropology; and discourse analysis. My undergraduate teaching at UAF is shaped by a civic and moral duty to leverage my scholarly training to help students become better people and citizens by cultivating analytic skills that inform how they interact with the world outside the classroom. I prioritize giving students opportunities for hands-on practice analyzing “everyday” and “real world” language materials so that they depart my courses with skills they say help them interpret events around them.