Visiting Researchers

Yumei Gan

yumei.gan@link.cuhk.edu.hk

PhD Candidate, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

Fields of Study
Video-mediated communication; Conversation Analysis; Video Analysis

I am a PhD Candidate in the Video Analysis, Science, and Technology (VAST) Research Group in the Department of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I have been awarded the Fulbright Junior Research Award to continue to work on my thesis at UCLA. In my PhD project, I study the role of video technologies in migrant families in China, in particular, how distributed families use these technologies to overcome family separation and try to achieve ‘distant love’ while living apart. Yumei uses qualitative video analysis to record and analyse video calls between migrant parents and their ‘left-behind’ children.

Website

http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/soc/MPhil-PhD/en/Gan_YM.html

UCLA Appointment
Fall 2019 through Summer 2020

Sara A. Goico

sgoico@g.ucla.edu

UC President’s and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA

Fields of Study
Linguistic Anthropology, Conversation Analysis, Deaf Studies

My research focuses on the organization of language and interaction in contexts with limited shared language. I primarily rely on ethnographic fieldwork combined with the microanalysis of video recordings of naturally occurring interactions. Over the last ten years, I have conducted fieldwork in Iquitos, Peru with deaf youth who have not had access to an established language. Along with my research activities, I worked with the Iquitos community to establish a deaf school that now provides these children with access to language. An ongoing research project investigates language socialization in the deaf school. While at UCLA, I will be spearheading a new study with deaf preschoolers in Southern California to examine the relationship between language delay and social interaction.

Website

https://sites.google.com/view/saragoico

UCLA Appointment
Summer 2019 through Summer 2021

Julia Katila

Julia.katila@tuni.fi

Postdoctoral researcher, Social Psychology, Tampere University

Fields of Study
Social psychology, interaction research, gender studies

I am a postdoctoral researcher from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, with a background in social psychology and the micro analysis of naturally occurring interactions. I have also carried out some work in the fields of discursive psychology, gender studies, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. My research interests include the study of gestures, affect, touch, and other forms of intercorporeal sociality in naturally occurring interactions. For my Ph.D. dissertation, I analyzed video-recorded interactions to study how tactile intercorporeality and subtle tactile communication emerge between mothers and their young children.

Continuing with similar topics, in my current research, I am studying the occurrence of touch, affect, and intimacy in different types of health-care encounters. Adopting video-recorded interaction data from general practitioners’ offices, prenatal clinics, and practical nurse–patient encounters, I am exploring how touch, affect, and intimacy unfold in these contexts and how they are adopted by the participants as practices of care and embodied communication. Closely related to this, my research interests also include studying how the robotization and technologization of health care influences how bodies interact with each other and are produced and perceived in health-care settings. To study this, I am analyzing video-recorded interactions in an experimental setting, where student practical nurses wear an exoskeleton—a robotic vest that provides human bodies with more power for lifting—to help an elderly patient move from a bed to a wheelchair. Combining video-recorded interactions with interviews and experimental data and comparing settings with and without an exoskeleton, I will investigate if the presence of an exoskeleton influences the subtlety of the embodied interaction between a practical nurse and a patient. Moreover, I am interested in how the embodied agency is distributed and experienced in the moments when a nurse wearing an exoskeleton touches and moves the patient’s
body.

Website
https://people.uta.fi/~julia.katila/#home

UCLA Appointment
Fall Quarter 2019 through Summer 2020

Adam Schwartz

adam.schwartz@oregonstate.edu

schwartzadam@ucla.edu

Associate Professor of Language, Culture & Society, Oregon State University

Fields of Study
Spanish language education, Spanish in the U.S., language and racism

As a language teacher who aims to be critically reflective of pedagogy and student experiences, my research aspires to follow suit. I study secondary and post-secondary Spanish language education in the U.S., and in particular the ways in which culture, borders, foreignness, race and privilege are constructed both in and outside classroom spaces. I am an ethnographer and discourse analyst.

My book project in progress frames how Spanish language curricula designed for “native” speakers of English has traditionally dissociated from explicit discussions and treatments of race and racial identity. I analyze how such de-racialization constructs an institutional space that effectively protects a dominant culture of Whiteness (Hughey, 2010). Examples from popular adult and university-level education frame how Whiteness and White racism (Hill, 2008) appear in forms of classroom talk and instructional texts, along with interviews with students and educators. This research is designed to inform the development of language curricula that is both intentionally anti-racist (Casey, 2016; Flores & Chaparro, 2017; Rodriguez & Freeman, 2016) and responsive to a racially dynamic Spanish-speaking world. My work also intends to contribute to conversations with students and teachers about the ways in which language and race constitute each other in often ordinary, invisible ways.

Website
https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/users/adam-schwartz

UCLA Appointment
Summer Quarter 2019 & Fall Quarter 2019