Here is a glimpse of my ongoing and recent research projects.
Narratives of family language transmission: Linguistic family trees in Hawaiʻi (ongoing)
This is the linguistic family tree of Andrew Choy, who speaks English, Pidgin, and Spanish. Andrew's tree illustrates the process of language shift, as he doesn't speak Cantonese or Ilokano, the languages of his father and mother. He and his brother have added languages to their repertoires, however. His brother lives in China and has learned Mandarin, and Andrew learned Spanish while studying at UH-Manoa.
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Drawing on interviews from over 100 individuals across the state of Hawaiʻi, this project explores how people talk about their family language histories to better understand why and how languages are maintained or lost across generations. Through drawing a linguistic family tree in an interview, participants find opportunities to tell stories about themselves and their relatives that are intertwined with the larger historical and political contexts shaping language learning and use. We use stance analysis and appraisal theory to examine how people talk about their linguistic heritage in these contexts, paying particular attention to how they take oppositional stances toward discourses that lead to language shift. We view stance as the central locus for constructing and embodying favorable dispositions toward language and cultural maintenance. An interesting comparison is emerging among individuals who have maintained (to varying degrees) Hawaiian and Japanese. Given the decline of these languages among multiple generations due to colonization, oppression, and fear of being seen as "unAmerican," it is fascinating to see how young people in Hawaiʻi are (re)learning these languages (in whole or in part) and how they are fitting them into their identities. |
Intercultural health communicationDrawing on ethnographic field work in rural and urban areas of Tanzania, I continue to examine the discursive construction of knowledge in public health contexts. I have studied the impact of rationalist discourses promoted by the World Health Organization in peer education, discursive strategies of authorization and illegitimation in workshops involving indigenous healers and biomedical doctors, and discourses of responsibility and religion in community outreach events such as street theater.
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Local-global identitiesSince 2001, I have examined the discursive construction of local identities in Tanzania in response to globalizing forces. I have examined identity construction in youth culture (including hip hop and beauty pageants) and in workplace interactions through an ethnographic study of a newspaper office. A running thread through this research is that local-global tensions are often negotiated through humor and other forms of metasemiotic commentary. My writing is informed by Bakhtin's perspectives on heteroglossia and Appadurai's work on scapes.
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GeosemioticsI have examined the geosemiotics of both Tanzania and Hawai'i. In the Aloha State, signs deploy Pidgin (a.k.a. Hawaiʻi Creole) for both affiliative and oppositional purposes. My current research explores the new and highly politicized domains that Pidgin has entered recently, and seeks to find ways to engage the public in critical reflection of the 'value' that this often historically stigmatized language regularly demonstrates. Though Pidgin is often treated as a 'deficient' language relative to English, I am interested in seeing how it serves to advocate for local perspectives and local values in public space.
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