University of California, Santa Barbara

Post-Doc, Linguistics

University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow

Thesis Title: Morphophonological Practice: An Ethnographic Study of Grammar and Discourse in Four American English Stuttering Speech Communities

About

I situate my work as part of a research agenda that focuses on how social actors and institutions use language in the reproduction, alteration, and mediation of sociocultural structures within the political economy. My research emphasizes underrepresented sociolinguistic minorities, specifically American Stuttering English speakers (ASE), a group that has been all but unstudied within anthropology. As discussed in my dissertation, I conceptualize ASE as a marginalized, orderly sociolinguistic variety in which speakers use variational duplication as part of their plain morphology. My research for the next five years takes this work as a point of departure to explore how ASE speakers reproduce, critique, and alter ideologies of their language and place in the contemporary US, which is dominated by American Fluent English (AFE) speakers. In this new stage of my research, I plan to focus my publications on the themes of (a) language, power and the constitution of sociolinguistic identities in routine face-to-face interactions, (b) performance as a cultural arena for reshaping and critically reflecting on language and identities, and (c) the relationships between mass media and everyday interactions in the reproduction and critique of language ideologies. Moreover, I aim to make a methodological intervention into the ways in which ASE and other marginalized language varieties can be investigated in everyday life. Combining archival and interactional research, my current book project, "Stutter-Folk: (Un)Doing Language Aesthetics and Ideologies in American English Stuttering Speech Communities," examines the areas above in addition to how ASE speakers draw on stuttering as a sociolinguistic resource to co-construct and contest ideologies of whiteness, gender, and sexuality that are indirectly indexed through the normal/pathological linguistic dichotomy in broader discursive fields.

Before I became a linguistic anthropologist, I attended and matriculated from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, earning a BA in Cinema-Television and minoring in Cultural Anthropology. My coursework included both production and critical studies courses in both fiction and non-fiction film, television, and new media. My experiences in film were and continue to remain crucial in cultivating my interests in representation and semiotics, particularly in how social actors use mediated representations to co-construct their own identities and those of others within naturally-occurring interactions.

Research and Teaching Areas
Variational and referential duplication in natural language, language in/as social organization in cultural contexts, performance, language acquisition and socialization, theories and politics of transcription, language and critical media literacy, computer-mediated communication, language and identity, language and morality, critical native anthropology/ethnography

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