Teaching
Introduction
Dr. Arnold teaches courses in linguistic anthropology as part of the four-field approach of the UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology. Her overarching learning goal for students is that they develop a critical awareness of how language acts in their lives and in society, often in ways that shore up inequality.
Current Courses
Language, Culture, and Communication Anthro 105
Language is an important cultural and political force that shapes all aspects of our individual lives and shared experiences as communities. This large lecture class examines the causes and consequences of how people learn to use language, of common beliefs about “accents”, and of how language changes over time. The course explores the power of language in many current issues such as health, climate change, racism, and transphobia.
Language and Health Anthro 290
Fusing two anthropological subfields, medical anthropology and linguistic anthropology, this course provides concepts, tools, and training to help undergraduate students understand and analyze the interconnections between language, health, and wellbeing. The course begins by exploring how patients, medical professionals and others communicate in healthcare settings. From there, it expands to include language access and medical interpretation, public health and media communication, the role of the environment, and finally healing practices.
Methods in Linguistic Anthropology Anthro 360
This course introduces undergraduate students to linguistic anthropological research methods. Over the course of the semester, students will read about different methods used in the field explore examples of how such methods have been used in ethnographic research on language, culture, and communication. Most importantly, however, students will have the opportunity to practice utilizing a range of methodological approaches in a collective research project on The Everyday Politics of Language Use at UMass Amherst. Methods discussed include: conducting participant observation and taking fieldnotes, documenting linguistic landscapes and other texts, conducting and recording interviews, and indexing and transcribing recordings.
Theory and Method in Linguistic Anthropology Anthro 691
This course introduces graduate students to linguistic anthropology, a fundamentally ethnographic approach to the study of language and its embedding in social life. Students engage deeply with both foundational writings and emerging scholarship to grapple with the cultural meaningfulness and systematic nature of language as a consequential form of social action. Through the lens of ethnographic research, the course will explore the ways that language works to shore up intersecting inequalities along the lines of race, class, gender, and more. Students will gain a theoretical toolkit for understanding the fundamental role of communicative processes in sociocultural life, while also exploring the range of analytical insights to be gained from investigating language ideologies and linguistic practices through an ethnography of communication.
Care: Doing, Knowing, Being Anthro 497/697
What counts as care? For whom? In what contexts? And to what effects? In this course, we will draw on a range of ethnographic work, including cultural and linguistic anthropology, as well as feminist and indigenous theory, media, and activist literature to explore contemporary issues of care. In the three aspects of the class - doing, knowing, being - we examine care as a concrete everyday practice, one that is rooted in and shapes ways of understanding the world, and which has far-reaching implications that both reproduce and resist multiple intersecting inequalities. We will explore methodology. We will ask political questions. We will encourage a deeper consideration of care, not only through research and scholarship, but also in the interdependent ways in which we live our lives.