Academia
Here are links to papers, handouts, and other resources related to my research. For further information or inquiries, please feel free to e-mail me via the Contact section of this site.
I am currently a Teacher's Assistant at UCSB for LING 131: Sociolinguistics, and in the Spring 2011 Quarter, will be a Teacher's Assistant for LING 132: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. In addition, I am a Teaching Fellow at Carpinteria High School, where I am a part of a Language and Society elective class taught during the Spring 2011 semester.
I am presenting research at Rice University and UC Berkeley in February 2011 about my Corpus-based look at participants' survey responses to Prop 8 in the same-sex marriage movement. This project comes from a larger preliminary investigation conducted in early 2010 looking at several aspects of language and identity in discourse about same-sex marriage. This particular project looks at ways that heterosexual participants within the same-sex movement negotiate their presence and justify their participation as a non-normative minority within a predominantly LGBT setting. This paper will appear later in 2011 in the Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society under the title "The Linguistic Negotiation of Heterosexaulity in the Same-Sex Marriage Movement".
The powerpoint handout for the Rice Linguistics Society talk (Which I was unable to attend due to weather problems) is available here: (RLS Handout), and handouts/information about the Berkeley conference will be posted here shortly.
Media Discourse and Prop 8: This project is a Critical Discourse Analysis of the ways the Media (namely the San Francisco Chronicle) used coverage of Proposition 8 in and around the November 2008 election to de-legitimize same-sex marriage. This paper was presented at the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference at American University in Washington, DC on February 15, 2009. I am currently in the process of expanding and revising this research with plans to submit it for publishing sometime in 2011.
Identity Construction in Coming Out Stories: This is a look at narratives in interaction to investigate the discursive ways gay males use Coming Out stories to construct their identities. This paper has been revised and was presented at the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference at American University in Washington, DC in April 2010.
The Discourse of Same-Sex Marriage and Those Who Support It: A Corpus-Based Investigation takes data collected through my work with Marriage Equality, USA (see description below) to analyse discourse patterns about relationship terms (e.g. husband/wife vs partner), what marriage means to members of the Marriage Equality community, and identity formation differences between straight and gay respondents. This paper will likely be revised over the coming months as I would like to take these findings (and future findings) to conferences and/or seek publication. This project was co-authored with my classmate and friend Sherri Martin.
This paper is being expanded into several separate studies, including the research discussed above being presented at Berkeley and Rice Universities. Further research from this project will include a more in-depth look at the relationship terms used by LGBT members, looking at issues of indexicality and enregisterment as same-sex marriage becomes a more widespread and accepted social institution.
I am beginning research this year for my Master's Thesis using the same data collected through MEUSA to do a narrative analysis on discourses of discrimination during the Proposition 8 campaign and aftermath. I am specifically concerned with identity construction of the respondents as victims of discrimination, as well as their constructions of the identities of those who are discriminating against them. Research and analysis is beginning now, and updates will be posted here as they are available.
In the coming year, I will begin an extensive research project to document and distinguish accent patterns within California. I am hoping to show salient phonetic and phonological differences between speakers in various regions throughout the state, and will begin collecting extensive data in the coming months. This research will likely become my Dissertation project at UCSB.
Since December 2008, I have volunteered and interned with Marriage Equality, USA, a grassroots nonprofit working for same-sex marriage rights in California and the United States. As a policy intern and discourse analyst, I have been responsible for large-scale discourse analysis focused on survey responses to open-ended questions collcted online. I have helped to create reports on the ways that Prop 8 has affected the LGBT community, write pieces highlighting the reasons why the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell should be repealed, and created new sources of data (in the form of online surveys) to gather stories about the benefits same-sex marriage can have for a society. Having collected over 3,000 narratives from these projects, I am now working to create a coherent and comprehensive corpus of the data, organizing it in ways that can easily be referenced based on any number of demographic criteria, as well as from which campaign or project the stories originated from. Thus far, roughly 2,500 responses have been included in the corpus, and many more have yet to be added.
My Curriculum Vitae, updated February 2011.