Bio:
I grew up in Chicago, which has long been an immigrant-receiving city, and one in which questions of wealth, geography, and access to power are always in the air. Over the course of my education, I came to approach the richness and challenges that American communities engage with 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. In turn, I ask and answer questions about 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.
Another more recent area of my research involves multilingual video productions from micro-dramas to television to movies. I’m referring to productions that use several languages in dialog, or that highlight lesser known languages. What do these international/intercultural shows want to tell us about who we are as people and as audiences? What is it like for people as they watch and talk about such productions? And what trends define these productions for the future?
At the biggest level, I’m most engaged with trying to frame how the rich fabric and sophisticated discourses of economic, gender and sociolinguistic 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?