Julia Nee
I'm a bilingual researcher at the Exploratorium, and a recent PhD graduate in linguistics from UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. I enjoy working with users - whether museum visitors, language students, or anyone else - to deeply understand their experiences. I use interviews, focus groups, surveys and more to generate data that can help designers and educators improve the user experience and enhance learning.
My academic research has focused on in language revitalization and language documentation, which I explore through my work on Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec (zab) and Northern Pomo (pej). In my dissertation, Participatory Action Research in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec Language Revitalization, I describe and analyze how the process of participatory action research has allowed language activists, learners, and speakers to better understand the factors that promote (and inhibit) language revitalization in Teotitlán, and how these findings might be useful in other language revitalization contexts. Contact me at jnee at berkeley dot edu for more information.
Check out some things I've been up to lately:
Decentering Colonial Languages on Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies blog
Winning a GROW grant for grad student community building
Celebrating International Mother Language Day at Cal
Participating in the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization
Collaborating on language revitalization at the California Language Archive