Fieldwork

Guatemala

I have been doing linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork in highland Guatemala since 1995. While my primary focus, since 1998, has been working with Sakapulteko Maya in Sacapulas, I studied Uspanteko (in Uspantán) and Kaqchikel (in Comalapa) in graduate school, in the course of selecting a field site. Since 2008, I have also been conducting linguistic anthropological fieldwork with K'iche' in Nahualá.

Dog-Mushing in Alaska

With my colleague, Patrick Plattet, I have been studying and documenting the culture of dog mushing in Alaska for three field seasons (winter 2017, 2018, 2019). Our project, supported by an NSF EAGER grant, aims to contribute to research on human-animal interaction as well as to methods pedagogy. In line with the latter, one goal of the grant is to create an asynchronous, on-line ethnographic and linguistic anthropological methods class or "Virtual Field School," for undergraduate students who, for financial, family or other reasons, cannot pick up and spend 6 weeks away from home. This course was offered for first time in January 2019 and is distinct from typical methods classes in that it incorporates visual, semiotic and discourse analytic methods.

Through this project we have also spent three seasons following both distance (Iditarod and Yukon Quest) races as well as the Alaska sprint race circuit; we have been fortunate to spend time with mushers, handlers, time keepers and other mushing enthusiasts at musher's halls, races, their kennels and homes. One of our particular sites of interest are award ceremonies, a ritual that marks the end of any competition, no matter how small or informal.

conservative Political media

Thanks to having a car in graduate school that only had AM radio, I have been following (listening weekly) conservative talk radio in the US since 1994. (Yes, I have watched the evolution of Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Infowars since before there were blogs and websites devoted to summarizing what goes on in the conservative echo chamber). Rush Limbaugh's "common sense" rhetoric was the topic of my Master's thesis and I designed and began teaching a course on political media and discourses of the American Right in 2004, offered most recently at UAF in 2016. I am interested in using this "field site" to, among other things, interrogate what it means to do ethnographic fieldwork with mass media or virtual publics.

Pentecostalism

I was a reluctant attendee of an Assemblies of God congregation beginning in my early teenage years. In graduate school I became interested in religious language and it made sense to examine that which was most familiar to me, so I undertook fieldwork with an Assemblies of God congregation in Southern California and collected cassette recordings of weekly sermons from my old church in Michigan. What animates me most about studying Pentecostalism is how language, music and embodied practices come together to create a "personal experience" of the divine. In 2009 I was awarded a grant to carry out multi-sited, comparative research with Pentecostal and charismatic congregations in Sacapulas and Nahualá.