Bio:
I grew up in Chicago, which has long been an immigrant-receiving city, and one in which questions of race and ethnicity, inequality, geography, and access to power are always in the air. Over the course of my education, I came to approach the richness and challenges of American diversity through the study of language in interaction, the linguistic performance of group belonging, and intercultural dialog. In my early career, after fieldwork with African immigrants, I worked on developing new ideas about child and youth (im)migrants and human development. The topic of youth, human development and the future remain a central thread in my work.
In the last decade, I have developed work on the portrayal of violence against women in television and other popular media, especially around changing the status quo around the treatment of women worldwide. I have many questions about how audience and producers influence each other around content on streaming-video-on demand and in turn, how various kinds of global access to streaming video coincide with social movements, social media marketing trends, and competing political stances around women’s rights.
Despite having two different research areas, I’m most engaged with trying to frame how the rich fabric and sophisticated discourses of economic, ethnic and gender difference can inform a progressive basis by which to approach the environmental and social challenges of a planet in dire straits. Clearly, we need to change quickly, but out of what, and how?