JENNY DAVIS, Department of Linguistics
I'm interested in how double/multiple minority individuals and groups linguistically negotiate these multiple aspects of their identity. Specifically, I'm working with Two-Spirit (indigenous GLBTQ)groups as well as black indigenous individuals/communities specifically descendents of freedmen and the "Five Civilized Tribes."

MARK EATON, Department of Sociology
I am currently in my third year of the PhD. program in the Department of Sociology. My dissertation research will examine MoveOn.org, a progressive social movement organization that is primarily web-based or “virtual.” Using multiple methods, I hope to analyze: a) how active members of MoveOn construct self-identities in relation to their activism; b) if these members have a sense of collective identity associated with being part of MoveOn; c) how MoveOn uses rhetorical language in e-mail messages to members in order to facilitate collective identity formation and mobilize activists; and d) whether MoveOn’s combination of online activism and “real world” grassroots participation constitutes a new form of political activism.

JANET L. EVANS, Department of Communication
My primary academic interest is critical and cultural studies of technology and the way we communicate about technology. For my dissertation, I am considering voting as an act of communication and how fears and vulnerabilities about voting surface throughout history. I also consider voting machines as a technological artifact and how media and culture come to shape the voting experience historically. With respect to issues of power and domination, I focus on Pierre Bourdieu’s work. My secondary area of interest relates to language and social interaction, specifically the role of public deliberation in decision-making. I have researched Boulder City Council deliberations for a number of projects, examining issues related to humor and identity.

GEORGE FIGGS, Department of Linguistics
I am interested in studying language in the context of music. My research focuses on how identities are projected and negotiated during musical performance, via tactics such as adequation, distinction, authentication, and intertextuality. My current research focuses on how these techniques manifest themselves in the improvised vocal performance genre of freestyle rap. I am also interested in how identities collectively emerge in the course of freestyle rap performances.

ELIZABETH FRANKO, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
My work focuses on ideal democracy, and different ways democracy is shared or imagined, especially in popular culture. I have done work on the potential of the Internet as a viable Public Sphere, and am currently engaged in a project about democracy as an imaginative concept in Post-Communist Europe. I am also working on a book chapter titled "Democracy at Work: The Lessons of Donald Trump and The Apprentice." I plan to do my dissertation research on the exportation of democracy, and the role the mass media plays in this transmission.

STEPHEN GOETTESCHE, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
I am working on an M.A. in the department of Spanish with a focus on Education. My studies are quite varied, ranging from second language acquisition to Hispanic sociolinguistics to Hispanic literature. On the language acquisition end, I have done work applying language acquisition theory to curriculum theories in Education. I am currently working on a project that considers the impact of national standards and standardization trends on foreign language curriculums. In terms of sociolinguistics, I am researching the phonological characteristics of traditional New Mexican Spanish.

LORI HEINTZELMAN, Department of Linguistics
I am interested in the way people make meaning of the events in their lives via narrative - fashioning, sustaining, and transforming identities, particularly in the realms of gender and sexuality. This interest involves attention to the complex interplay between individual life narratives and the "master" narratives they draw from. My dissertation research focuses specifically on those affiliated with fundamentalist Christian ministries for the purpose of achieving "ex-gay" identity.

ADAM HODGES, Department of Linguistics
I am interested in applying a critical approach to the study of language, power and social interaction. My research mainly focuses on political and media discourse in order to examine the way identities are discursively constructed and the way power and domination are produced, circulated, and subverted. I am currently engaged in ongoing work that examines the discourses surrounding terrorism and war; and in particular, the discourses associated with the Bush administration's "war on terror."

NADIA KANEVA, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
I am a Doctoral Candidate at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. My current research focuses on the intersection of mediated discourses of consumption and the construction of national and cultural identities in post-socialist countries. More broadly, I am interested in narrative as a means of constructing collective identities and memories. I have studied the narratives of immigrants and of survivors of communist labor camps. I have also written on questions of identity and community in online environments, as well as on the processes of social construction of technology.

JESSICA LEE, Department of Anthropology
My research interests include Deaf studies, Disability studies, border theory, and identity. My current interest is in Deaf communities and identities in Africa and their resistance, adoption and modification of external educational and cultural frameworks as imported mainly from the United States. My MA research focused on the construction of hearing identities through negotiation of the Deaf/hearing border. I have a chapter in press called "Family Matters: Deaf Education for Girls in America, 1817-1930," in Women and Deafness: Multidisciplinary Approaches to be published in Fall 2006. This essay focuses in the overt and covert strategies employed by both mainstream and Deaf culture in education and training of Deaf girls and their responses.

AOUS MANSOURI, Department of Linguistics
I am interested in how language is used to index and foreground different aspects of the speaker’s identity. My research combines variationist sociolinguistic techniques in addition to ethnographic methods. My fields of interest include language acquisition, bilingualism (including issues in diglossia), and gender and sexuality studies.

LAURA MENDEZ BARLETTA, School of Education
I am interested in the mechanics of culturally embedded modes of learning among culturally and linguistically diverse students. I believe that by understanding in detail students' learning practices it will be possible to develop more effective ways of helping them succeed both in school and in life. My goal is to understand the culturally structured ways in which culturally and linguistically diverse students learn so as to develop ways to reach out to them both within and beyond the classroom.

BRYCE MERRILL, Department of Sociology
I am a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. I am primarily interested in social psychological narrative studies. My current research is on the Jim Rome Show, a nationally syndicated sports radio show. I focus on the ways callers to this show, the Clones, narrate identities, communities, and inequalities. I am also working on an analysis of the uses of narrative across several related disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and cultural studies.

JULIEN MIRIVEL, Department of Communication
I am a discourse analyst/micro-ethnographer. My work focuses on the study of face-to-face interaction that occurs in institutional settings (especially those situated at the nexus of cultural and medical forces). My current work explores cosmetic surgery, a controversial cultural-medical practice that lies at the junction of medicine, consumerism, and cultural meanings of beauty. The study is an ethnographically-informed discourse analysis of communicative practices at Beautiful You Clinic, a plastic and aesthetic surgery center, and investigates pre- and post-surgery videotaped interactions between plastic surgeons and patients seeking aesthetic surgery (e.g., lipoplasty and mammaplasty) to identify and explain the communication challenges, difficulties, and dilemmas that the participants face.

CHAD NILEP, Department of Linguistics
I have been called a sociolinguist, a linguistic anthropologist, and a sociologist of language. You can call me Chad. I study Japanese speakers in the United States, as well as bilingual speakers in Japan. My interests include bilingualism, code switching, and language and political economy. I am attempting to develop a theory of political micro-economy, which draws from microanalysis of face-to-face interaction, and broader ideas from practice theory and related frameworks.

MICHAEL J. OROSCO, School of Education
I am currently a doctoral student in the field of ESL/Bilingual Special Education. Previously, I was a bilingual special education teacher in Colorado's public school system and Denver Health's Hospital Psych Adolescent Department. My research interests are in the areas of Literacy, Positive Behavior Supports, and Culturally Responsive Teaching. I continue to use this research in helping to address the disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education.

JOSHUA RACLAW, Department of Linguistics
I am a doctoral student in the department of linguistics. My primary interests lie broadly in issues of language and identity - especially pertaining to the study of language, gender, and sexuality - and in conversation analytic approaches to spoken and computer-mediated discourse. My dissertation research focuses on the relationship between linguistic practice and social discourses of compulsory monogamy, particularly the everyday construction and reproduction of monogamy as a normative sexual and domestic practice in talk-in-interaction.

JACLYN RASKA, Department of Sociology
I am a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. I am primarily interested in the discursive construction of genders, sexualities, and the body. My current research focuses on the social construction of sexual dysfunction in women.

GILANA RIVKIN, Department of Linguistics
My research interests spring from many years of working with marginalized and disadvantaged groups and individuals, including Muslim women in the US, undocumented incarcerated men, political torture victims and asylees, and inner-city/homeless children and families. The topic of my dissertation looks at the nexus among language, culture, and cognition, in an attempt to disambiguate language socialization issues from a potentially overly-westernized academic conceptualization of cognition. I am the recipient of the 2005 Dorothy Martin Award for commitment to excellence in teaching and combining academic research with social justice and action, and the 2005 recipient of a CDE participant-observer grant for innovative methods in combining direct service with field methods research. In addition to pursuing my Ph.D., I am currently spearheading implementation of a program to develop a centralized resource and consistent quality of care across 50+ Denver-area sites serving homeless children and families, and to develop standards for consistency across the continuum of services already provided.

DANIEL SALAS DÍAZ, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
I am Ph.D. Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department. Although my main purpose is to analyze language as a narrative tool and as a aesthetic effect, I do not see any contradiction between formal studies of language and social ones. In fact, one of my goals is to show how what we call “literature” is a social practice derived from basic cognitive operations. My research analyzes the role of literary discourse in the construction of indigenous identity in colonial Peru. I suggest that textual debates carried out by Christian missionaries over the capacity of indigenous peoples [indios] during the colonial period is central to the representation of indios as subjects lacking full understanding.

SUSANNE STADLBAUER, Department of Linguistics
I am working on applying theories in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to the Arabic language and Arab culture. I am specifically interested in the construction of identities against the background of gender politics, and the impact of Western-style modernities in Egypt. My work focuses on identities created through discourse and narratives, with specific attention paid to merging microanalyses of language with social theories on gender and modernity.

MARCIA VAN'T HOF, Department of Communication
I am a feminist thinker who wonders how talk and silence construct identity, community, agency, oppression, and resistance within contexts such as classrooms, school boards, city council meetings, peace actions, and religious communities. I hope that my dissertation--as I envision it, an ethnographically informed discourse analysis--will provide a safe space for clergy wives to share currently unspoken narratives. I think that their stories will illustrate how people may orchestrate insider/outsider identity within a role codified by a community.

M. ROY WARNOCK, Department of Linguistics
In general, I am interested in the role of language in the construction, maintenance and subversion of national identity. My research on endangered language learners focuses on identity as emergent through discourse. In particular, I investigate the ways in which learners of Celtic languages in Britain and North America establish a stance towards the nation-state by code switching between English and Celtic languages. I also look at more reflexive language practices as they surface in narrative.

WELDU WELDEYESUS, Department of Linguistics
My primary area of research is a sociolinguistic study of Ethiopian immigrants in the United States, specifically focusing on language socialization and identity construction. My interests include sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, aspects of the grammar of Tigrinya (my mother tongue), comparative Ethiopian Semitic, and linguistics as applied to language teaching (because of my previous training in TEFL/applied linguistics).

LAL ZIMMAN, Department of Linguistics
My research deals primarily with issues of language, gender, and sexuality, with a focus on the speech of gender-variant communities. These communities include transsexuals in the US (particularly the understudied female-to-male population), speakers with subversive gender identities like genderqueer, and internet-based communities which have recently become a major locus of transgender support and discussion. I'm interested in how these speakers use language to shape their identity, the tensions between authenticity and performance, and cross-cultural studies of gender-variance.

CLASP Alumni

SARA BALDER, Department of Linguistics
Graduated with BA/MA 2005
My work focuses on the connection between language and the social values surrounding gender, sexual identity, and discrimination. Specifically, I examine the role of everyday discursive practices in the social construction of heteronormative identity, and explore how they endorse the illegitimation and marginalization of gender and sexual minorities. My main area of research is Chilean language and culture, and I am currently working on an MA thesis entitled "Language, heterosexism, and identity: Normative Chilean discursive practices." I hope to expand this project to encompass heteronormative discursive practices in other Latin American counties.