“I’m Black, but...”: Black Undergraduates’ Community NonIdentification Talk in a Historically White Institution (Under Review)

Bridging theories of racial socialization and language socialization, this article argues that due to limited engagement with Black community prior to college, “Black non-community identified” students at Historically White Institutions (HWIs) may align with spatiotemporally- specific depictions of Blackness. Disambiguating racial identity from racial community identification informs strategies for socialization of these students into Black community identification, increasing students’ sense of belonging as well as social and personal outcomes. 

“‘It’s very Isolating:’ Discourse of Conservative Student Groups on a Liberal University Campus

Highlighting the discursive strategies (contrastive essentialism, appropriation of liberal discourse, and memeing), this ethnographic engagement discusses internal and external dynamics of young conservative in a liberal campus context.

What All Black College Students Deserve to Know About Linguistics (And The Rest of Y’all Should Know Too).

Co-authored with many scholars participating in the NSF funded Talking College Project, we engage with the need for more linguistic information to reach Black students as a critical equity issue in higher education, such that they have agency in their own linguistic and cultural destinies and also can impact the empowerment of other Black students. 

You have never lived a day outside of your body: Engaging Gendered and Racialized Positionality in Ethnographic Research.

This work highlights the importance of engaging, at all phases of the research process, racial and gendered positionality, in addition to the methodological implications of occupying a subject position that is precariously situated within sociopolitical and institutional power dynamics.

Virtue Signaling and the Linguistic Repertoire of Anti-Blackness: or, “I Would Have Voted for Obama for a Third Term”

This piece is co-authored with deandre miles-hercules. Increasing commodification of progressive language in public discourse over the past four decades has resulted in users’ indexical alignment with anti-racist politics becoming unmoored from expectations of legitimate action toward dismantling white supremacy. In this essay, we describe how this process is enacted through virtue signaling—highlighting one’s morality through the use of language and other signs that invoke progressive sociopolitical values—and the ways it mobilizes the linguistic repertoire of anti-Blackness. Theorizing this behavior provides a framework to locate and confront the mechanisms that maintain white supremacy and the actors who align themselves with it.

Empowering African-American Student Voices in College. In Reconceptualizing the Role of Critical Dialogue

Co-authored with Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Erin L. Berry-McCrea, this chapter contributes to research that seeks to create more socially just and equitable environments in higher edu- cation, particularly for African-American students as a highly underrepresented population, especially at elite universities.

Conversation in the classroom.

Co-authored with CSU San Jose Education Professor Carrie Holmberg, we discusses on of the dynamics of classroom participation, and some strategies to create a more equitable classroom environment.