ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2151-8485
Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Katherine-Morales-6?ev=hdr_xprf
My research lies at the intersection of language and identity, motivation, language use and its social meaning, cultural insights of language (specializing in U.S. and Spanish-English contexts).
As part of my PhD dissertation and forthcoming research monograph, I conducted an ethnographic study that explores how Puerto Rican English learners experience language not just as a skill, but as a site of identity, belonging, and resistance. Grounded in over 300,000 words of natural language data, 50+ interviews, ethnographic classroom fieldnotes, and sustained observation, this project reveals how beliefs about language, race, and community shape the learner journey in powerful and often invisible ways.
By analyzing these patterns through sociolinguistic and ethnographic research lenses, I surfaced actionable insights for inclusive pedagogical design, equitable education policy, and learner-centered language tools; I also uncover the reality of different varieties of bilingual speech within the archipelago today.
The study reframes bilingualism as fluid, contextual, and deeply political—suggesting a model for designing with historically marginalized learners in multilingual and postcolonial settings in ways that acknowledge the complexities of language and identity and legitimize diverse language abilities in practice.
Additional skills: Human subject research ethics for vulnerable populations (children), NVivo QDA (Qualitative Data analysis), in-depth and focus group interviews, ethnographic observations, multilingual and multimodal discourse analysis and content/thematic coding.
Publications:
Morales, K. (forthcoming). English in Modern Day Puerto Rico: Identities, ideologies and linguistic practices of the island youth. [Under contract: Multilingual Matters].
Morales, K., & Soto, S. (forthcoming). Decolonizing Language Practices in Puerto Rico: Translanguaging and Identity among Youth. [Chapter] in International Handbook of Latinés and Education. Cambridge University Press.
Morales, K. (2019). " I always knew it... Digo, quizás no era perfect": transnational acts of identity in the speech of a returnee migrant. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 58(1), 11-32.
Lugo, K. M. (2019). Reimagining bilingualism in late modern Puerto Rico: The ‘ordinariness’ of English language use among Latino adolescents. In Translinguistics (pp. 130-145). Routledge.
Media coverage:
Interview 🗣️ on Analisis Radial: https://soundcloud.com/katherine-ravenna-morales-lugo/analisis-radial-con-jose-elias?si=7b6b6bf666124567a21368a110376569&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
DIGITAL LANGUAGE PRACTICES OF YOUNG BILINGUAL LATINX
What does bilingual expression really look like in the digital lives of Puerto Rican youth? This three-month digital ethnography set out to answer that question by closely examining how young people communicate across social platforms, memes, chat threads, and other participatory media spaces. As Principal Ethnographic Researcher, I led the project and supervised student research assistants in language and thematic coding, documenting authentic, everyday language practices in which English and Spanish blended not only for communicative purposes, but as resources for identity-making, humor, and cultural and racial commentary—revealing what it means to be Puerto Rican and bilingual in the 21st century.
Using NVivo QDA, ethnographic field notes, and multimodal discourse analysis, I traced how Spanish consistently anchored interactions, while English often appeared in stylized bursts—through memes, GIFs, catchphrases, and references to U.S. popular culture. These language choices also became resources for negotiating dimensions of social identity, including gender, race, and sociopolitical positioning. Language was not simply a tool for communication; it provided a way to signal belonging, remix global cultural content through locally meaningful practices, and navigate the layered political and cultural realities of living in a U.S. territory.
The findings were published in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language as part of a special issue bringing together contemporary research on language in Puerto Rico, and they also contribute to a forthcoming monograph by Katherine Morales on bilingualism, language ideologies, and identity among Puerto Rican youth in the 21st century. By documenting bilingual practices in informal, unscripted digital interactions, the study challenges monolingual assumptions about language use and offers a ground-level perspective on how bilingual communication actually unfolds in young people’s everyday lives.
For educators, designers, and cultural media creators, this work underscores the social and stylistic roles that languages play in Puerto Rico. It calls for greater attention to how language, identity, and culture are co-created online—and to how bilingual speakers strategically draw on their linguistic repertoires to communicate who they are, where they belong, and how they position themselves in relation to both local and global cultural worlds.
Additional skills: Human subject research online; digital observations, discourse analysis and multimodal analysis
Publications:
Morales, K. (forthcoming). English in Modern Day Puerto Rico: Identities, ideologies and linguistic practices of the island youth. [Under contract: Multilingual Matters].
Morales Lugo, K. (2024). The bilingual styles of young Puerto Rican adolescents online. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024(286), 53-85.
Authors: Katherine Morales Lugo, Gabriel Romaguera, Edward Contreras
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced education online, educators in Puerto Rico faced an abrupt transition to remote teaching within a context already shaped by infrastructural instability, uneven internet access, and significant pressures on students and their families. In this case study, I served as lead researcher alongside educators Gabriel Romaguera and Edward Contreras to examine what this transition looked like on the ground—and how educators adapted their teaching in response to rapidly changing student needs.
Drawing on educator surveys and reflective, autoethnographic journaling, we documented both the practical and human dimensions of emergency remote teaching. Students and educators navigated unreliable connectivity, unfamiliar Learning Management Systems, caregiving responsibilities, burnout, and unequal access to computers and other technology. Rather than treating these challenges as peripheral to instruction, we examined how they directly shaped participation, access, assessment, and course design.
Using Google Forms for survey data collection and NVivo QDA for qualitative coding and analysis, we identified recurring patterns related to digital inequality, connectivity, student engagement, and the emotional pressures of learning during a crisis. At the same time, we used reflexive pedagogical practices to respond to student feedback and continually adjust instructional design. Teaching became an iterative process: identifying barriers, listening to students, modifying course expectations and delivery, and evaluating what worked under rapidly changing conditions.
Some of the most effective responses prioritized flexibility, accessibility, and students’ immediate circumstances. These included asynchronous learning opportunities, flexible deadlines, communication through widely accessible tools such as WhatsApp, and alternative modes of completing and submitting assessments—including options that students could access using smartphones. The study also documented educators’ resilience and creativity as they adapted established teaching practices to an environment for which neither instructors nor students had been fully prepared.
The findings were published by Springer as a chapter in Emergency Remote Teaching and Beyond. More broadly, the study contributes to conversations about inclusive and responsive instructional design by showing that effective remote education cannot be separated from the technological, socioeconomic, cultural, and emotional conditions in which students are learning.
The project offers a case study of how locally grounded knowledge, educator reflexivity, and iterative instructional design can inform educational responses during periods of disruption—particularly in contexts where reliable technology and connectivity cannot be assumed.
Methods & Research Skills: Survey design · Qualitative research · Autoethnography · Reflective journaling · Thematic coding · Qualitative data analysis · Instructional feedback analysis
Tools & Technical Skills: NVivo QDA · Google Forms · Google Workspace · Learning Management Systems (Moodle) · Remote instructional technologies
Publication:
Morales Lugo, K., Romaguera, G., & Contreras, E. (2021). How to adapt in a crisis: An ethnographic approach to (re)building coursework. In J. Chen (Ed.), Emergency Remote Teaching and Beyond. Springer.
Editors: Katherine Morales Lugo, Kevin Carroll, and Simon Campos
Leading a Multi-Author Publication on Spanish and English Language Practices in Puerto Rico
Editorial Leadership · Research Synthesis · Multimethod Research · Scholarly Publication · Public Engagement
August 2022 – April 2024
What does contemporary research tell us about the languages of Puerto Rico—from how Spanish and English are used in everyday life and educational settings to their historical development, linguistic structures, and distribution across different social groups?
I served as a lead editor of Languages in Modern-Day Puerto Rico, a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language that brought together scholars from Puerto Rico and the continental United States to examine contemporary Spanish and English language practices from multiple linguistic perspectives.
As part of the editorial leadership team, I helped develop the intellectual direction and scope of the project, coordinate contributions from multiple scholars, guide manuscripts through the editorial and publication process, and synthesize research grounded in substantially different theoretical and methodological traditions.
The collection brought together a particularly broad range of approaches to understanding Puerto Rico's linguistic landscape. These included classroom and digital ethnographies documenting Spanish-English language practices in educational and everyday digital environments; historical sociolinguistic research tracing language practices and change over time; structural and grammatical analyses examining the social distribution of Spanish linguistic forms, including research engaging theories of grammaticalization and creolization; and quantitative statistical research drawing on standardized-testing and population-level data to examine patterns in language ability and shed light on the relationships between socioeconomic status, gender, and English-language ability.
I also co-authored the issue's 22-page introductory article, synthesizing findings across the collection and situating the individual studies within broader scholarship on the languages of Puerto Rico. This required bringing together research operating at very different analytical scales and with very different forms of evidence—from ethnographic observations of language as it is used in classrooms and digital interactions, to historical records and linguistic forms, to population-level statistical patterns in language ability.
Research Skills: Editorial leadership · Multi-author project coordination · Research synthesis · Cross-disciplinary collaboration · Scholarly editing · Literature review · Publication coordination · Research dissemination
Research Areas & Methods Represented: Classroom ethnography · Digital ethnography · Multimodal and sociolinguistic analysis · Historical sociolinguistics · Structural and grammatical analysis · Language variation and change · Grammaticalization and creolization · Quantitative statistical analysis · Standardized-testing data · Demographic analysis
Publications
Morales-Lugo, K., Carroll, K. S., & Campos, S. D. (Eds.). (2024). Languages in modern day Puerto Rico. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024(286).
Morales-Lugo, K., Carroll, K. S., & Campos, S. D. (2024). Introduction to special issue: Languages in modern day Puerto Rico. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024(286), 1–22.