You can find information on my current research projects, recent and upcoming conference presentations, and publications.
Hardison, T. 2026 (under review). Speaking between worlds: Gay men's linguistic navigation across rural and urban Southern U.S. spaces.
Sikhonde, L.V. (2025). Vus’ Ulwazi: Cultivating IsiZulu Language and Culture. (T. B. Hardison, Ed.) UGA Publishing and Prints.
Hardison, T. 2026. “Language Ideologies, Identity, and Classroom Discourse”. Talk given to the Classroom Discourse Analysis course, University of Georgia. (Upcoming)
Hardison, T. 2024. “Introduction to Lavender Linguistics”. Lecture given to the Undergraduate Linguistics Club Athens, Georgia.
Hardison, T., Sara Epps, and Ivy Scarlett. 2023. “Clueless and Classroom Discourse Analysis”. Talk given to the Classroom Discourse Analysis course, University of Georgia.
Hardison, T. and Meg Fletcher. 2023. “Dialect Variation in the Southern U.S.” Lecture given to the Universidade Federal de Alfenas, Brazil.
Hardison, T. and Jon Forrest. 2026. “Queer speech of the rural South: Bricolage and the negotiation of competing” identities. Paper presented at the 93rd Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL 93), Georgia State University. (Upcoming)
Hardison, T. 2025. “Speaking between worlds: Gay men’s linguistic navigation across rural and urban Southern spaces”. Paper presented at the 9th Linguistics Conference at UGA (LCUGA 9), University of Georgia.
Hardison, T. 2025. “Speaking between worlds: Gay men’s linguistic navigation across rural and urban Southern U.S. spaces”. Paper presented at the 31st Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference (Lavlang 31), Manchester Metropolitan University.
Hardison, T. and Jon Forrest. 2025. “‘I’ll Bust Out the Southern Accent’: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Gay Men’s Navigation of Rural and Urban Southern U.S. Spaces”. Paper presented at the 53rd New Ways of Analyzing Variation Conference (NWAV 53), University of Michigan.
Hardison, T. 2024. “Linguistic performance of identity among gay men in rural and urban Southern spaces”. Paper presented at the Language Variety in the South 5 (LAVIS 5) / 91st Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL 91), University of Georgia.
My dissertation looks to investigate how people from rural areas of the South use language to navigate different spaces they may interact with. For example, how do people from these rural areas modify their language when in more urbanized areas of the South as opposed to the rural areas they grew up in? Specifically, I am interested in this process regarding minoritized people groups of rural areas. While this dissertation's main takeaways are broad, the work itself focuses on gay men of the rural South. Considering their navigation of these rural and urbanized areas, both with their own unique set of cultural expectations for gay men, I am conducting the following studies using focus groups:
Impact of language ideologies on linguistic production. Follows the methodologies and findings of Hardison (forthcoming) and expands with new data. Employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Van Dijk 2015; Fairclough 2023) to analyze the ways in which gay men from the rural South rely on commonly held language ideologies in their own daily use of language to navigate spaces they deem to be unwelcoming of their identities as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Bricolage, Southern vowels, and /s/. Uses sociophonetic methodologies to analyze the ways in which participants create meaning relevant to their identities as gay men from the South using varying realizations of /s/ and traditionally Southern vowels.
Co-constructed meaning and Discourse Analysis (DA). Relies on Interactional Sociolinguistic (Gumperz 1982, 1999, 2001) as the framework for investigating how participants from similar backgrounds and hometowns use contextualization cues, stance-taking, and positioning in order to create meaning around what it means to be a gay man from X place in the South.
This project through the Georgia Lab of Sociolinguistics (GLoSS) at UGA investigates the linguistic variation college students utilize in order to orient themselves either towards or away from the university they attend. I make use of variationist sociolinguistic methods to analyze how vowel quality reflects the ways that students feel about their Southern institution. If a student feels strongly connected to their university (and vice versa), which readily available, local variables do they use to express that?