Bio and Research
Bio
Dr. Lynnette Arnold is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a linguistic anthropologist with a primary area of focus in the Americas, where she has conducted research on language, care, and migration.
Dr. Arnold works to create interdisciplinary conversations about the social power of language, demonstrating that attention to linguistic practices can generate consequential new understandings into pressing current issues. This approach is exemplified in her monograph, Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families (Oxford University Press, Studies in the Anthropology of Language, 2024).
Research Areas
Language and Health
Dr. Arnold’s research advances emerging scholarship at the intersection of linguistic and medical anthropology.
She has advanced a communicative care framework that theorizes the complex entanglements of language and care. She outlines this framework in her article Communication as Care across Borders: Forging and Co-Opting Relationships of Obligation in Transnational Salvadoran Families (American Anthropologist 2021). Her book provides a detailed but accessible examination of how families use communicative care to find ways to live together across borders, and includes a teaching guide.
Dr. Arnold co-edited a special issue of Medical Anthropology on Communicating Care (2020). The introduction to this special issue, How Communicative Approaches Enrich the Study of Care, offer insights into care that emerge from attention to language as a form of social action, contributing novel perspectives on topics of concern to medical anthropology, including structural violence and care, the temporality of care, and the ontology of care. Dr. Arnold’s article in this issue, Cross-Border Communication and the Enregisterment of Collective Frameworks for Care, examines how one family used cross-border communication to manage a health crisis, demonstrating that everyday communication is a powerful force that works both within and beyond immediate care work encounters.
Dr. Arnold is the lead editor on an edited volume under contract with Oxford: Language and Health in Action, which brings together cutting-edge scholarship at this intersection for undergraduate students and interdisciplinary audiences.
Language and Migration
Dr. Arnold’s work advances understanding of the role of language in contexts of migration, with a focus on migration from El Salvador to the United States. She seeks to trace how dominant discourses and everyday language practices alike shape understandings and experiences of migration.
She recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Gender and Language that explores how ideologies of gender and sexuality circulate in dominant migration discourses and are contested by mobile communities. In the introduction to the special issue, Dr. Arnold draws attention to Global South theorizations of migration as resistance, suggesting that scholars of language, gender and sexuality can build on such approaches to trace forms of agency that otherwise might go unnoticed. The issue also includes a research article, “National Heroes or Dangerous Failures?” in which she examines how the Salvadoran state has deployed gendered depictions of migrants across three decades to advance nation-building projects.
Beyond academia, Dr. Arnold has also published many public-facing commentaries about U.S. immigration policy and its impacts on Central American migrants. She also consistently engaged in efforts to support immigrant communities in the United States.