Natasha Shrikant

Natasha Shrikant, PhD, (she/her), is an associate professor in the Department of Communication. Natasha uses qualitative methods, namely ethnography and discourse analysis, to analyze how social interaction constitutes identities and inequalities. She is interested in the 'micro' details of how people use language in different ways at different times and why that's important for thinking about broader issues of identity, culture, race/ism, and inequality. 

Her previous projects have explored (a) how Asian Americans construct race, ethnicity, and diversity in an Asian American organization and (b) how meanings of “racism” are constituted and contested in online and political discourses. Currently, Natasha is part of an NSF grant-funded project exploring how misinformation circulates among Asian American and Pacific Islander communities on social media platforms. Natasha is involved in analyzing the discursive strategies that constitute this misinformation and designing trainings and communicative interventions that can remedy the harmful effects of this misinformation. Natasha is also conducting community-based research with a refugee-serving organization in Colorado. In this project, she is facilitating focus groups with refugee communities and analyzing how participants construct stances towards identity, literacy, and multilingualism. Findings will inform the construction of a ‘language library’ containing multilingual books that serve needs voiced by refugee communities.