I am a sociolinguist and community-based researcher who examines how language, surveillance, and institutional power shape social life. Bringing sociolinguistics into conversation with critical social theory and abolitionist thought, I am developing a sociolinguistics of surveillance: an approach to understanding how people anticipate the institutional gaze, regulate their communicative practices in response to it, and use language to navigate, negotiate, and resist systems of power.

My research began by examining how racialized, gendered, and ableist ideologies shape linguistic perception—particularly judgments about who sounds authentic, competent, or legitimate. My current work follows these processes into institutions where linguistic perception and self-regulation carry material consequences, including prisons, policing, and emerging surveillance technologies. My research with incarcerated people, for example, examines the sociolinguistic labor required to navigate competing communicative demands under conditions of heightened surveillance. 

Alongside this linguistic focus, I conduct participatory and community-based research that asks who has the authority to identify research problems, produce knowledge, and develop theory. I work with incarcerated and system-impacted researchers to investigate institutional conditions and circulate knowledge across and beyond institutional walls, treating experiential knowledge as integral to both empirical research and theorization. 

Across these strands, I am interested in how research can make systems of power more legible while producing accessible knowledge that contributes to collective inquiry, political education, and communities already organizing for structural change.