Graduated with PhD in 2019
As a Doctoral student in Communication, my research interests include language and social interaction, cultural communication, and, more specifically, the ethnography of communication. Thematically, I focus on discourses relating to the “rural brain drain”—the mass-migration of college-educated young people away from rural communities and into metropolitan cities. Within rural community ways of speaking, I am particularly interested in how people express affinity for place and characterize rural community life in their own terms. This line of research allows me to expand upon my prior study of young people’s “staying,” “going,” and “returning” practices and how these moments are cultural situated and communicatively interpreted.