About: I am a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (but grew up around here). I study the intersection of language and culture in various contexts, and dedicate most of my time to language documentation work. This involves working with speakers of languages that do not have a written tradition to record, transcribe, and translate examples of their language like videos about cultural knowledge, history, traditional stories, ecological knowledge, and just regular conversations (which get archived for future use by the community, schools, and/or researchers).
I mainly do this type of work with speakers of an Indigenous language in the Amazon region of Ecuador, whom I’ve been working with on and off for over a decade. My work most recently has been focused on language in motion, so we use GoPro cameras on hikes in the rainforest to better understand not only the structure of spoken language, but how people gesture and what people know about the land.