Research

Language is a central part of human sociality

Whether it is written, spoken, or signed, language is the the medium through which we navigate our worlds, identities, relationships, and sense of self. My research employs a variety of linguistic methods -including community interviews, acceptability judgement tasks, multimedia and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, and text mining -to answer questions about how people use language to make sense of gender, sexuality, race, and other social categorization schema.

As much of my recent research has taken place on Twitter, I am particularly interested in the ethics of social media text mining for linguistic and anthropological research, and in developing research practices that better protect online subjects.

Finally, I am interested in television and other popular mass media, and the ways that language choice, translation strategies, and (de)centering of English-speaking audiences become part of the text and meta-text of a story.

I follow Crenshaw (1989) and other feminist scholars of color in understanding marginalizations based on gender, sexuality, race, disability, class, and language as interwoven issues that co-constitute and amplify each other at the places where they intersect. As such, I do not consider linguistics a subject that can be divorced from social context or from the systems of power that affect all speakers across time and place. 

Publications

Manuscripts in Preparation

Recent Talks