The goal of this research is to contribute to academic conversations that rethink how we can identify and represent group interests and motivations without minimizing group-internal diversities of individual perspective and experience. This topic is vital to linguistic study of minority groups, especially Indigenous communities that are often uncritically portrayed as static, monolithic, or “removed” from the contemporary world. This linguistic anthropology research revisits the concept of “ideological clarification” in the case of an organization of Ryukyuan language activists called Okinawa Hands-On that operates out of Okinawa Prefecture in Japan. Through an analysis of texts produced and presented by this organization at a “cultural lecture,” I formulate the concept of multiplicities to suggest a view of ideological clarification as fragmented, iterative and revisable. I emphasize the theoretical application/approach of (inter)textuality as a means of identifying the various indexical practices (e.g. valorizing Ryukyuan languages through appeals to historical “diversity”) that are differentially applied by activists involved in the “same” goal of ideological clarification.

This thesis examines how Mesoamerican healing knowledge and practices persist among Indigenous people living away from their homelands. The Mesoamerican diaspora in Los Angeles is Indigenous, with many Zapotec, Mixtec, Mixe, and Maya people now calling the region their home. This qualitative study is informed by archival research, open-ended interviews, and participant observation. I interviewed three Indigenous knowledge keepers in Los Angeles to discuss how living far from their traditional homelands affects Indigenous knowledge production and transmission. Four themes are identified in the thesis: transforming fear into motivation and hope, Indigenous identity and knowledge, Indigenous knowledge and transmission, and Indigenous approaches to health and healing. The research findings demonstrate that Indigenous knowledge keepers are maintaining Indigenous knowledge by honoring what I call “abuelita knowledge” and creating sites for knowledge transmission through online platforms, community workshops, and family mentorship.

The Exception from Informed Consent (EFIC) regulatory mechanism can be used to waive federal informed consent requirements for emergency medical research, pending satisfaction of pre-trial requirements. EFIC’s most notoriously challenging pre-trial requirement is ‘community consultation,’ a process through which EFIC researchers solicit public feedback on their trials. Using a Peircean semiotic framework, this thesis unpacks the presuppositions undergirding the idea that community consultation can reduce friction between emergency clinical trials carried out without informed consent and the values of patients enrolled in them. I introduce a semiotics of prediction, showing how assumptions about race figure prominently in the commensuration-based tasks of selecting community consultation respondents and subsequently generalizing findings from these respondents to broader populations. I suggest that in practice the content and / or generalizability of feedback collected through community consultation has very limited utility for reducing friction. Rather, community consultation’s primary function—as it is currently operationalized—is one of public relations, whereby the discursive processes through which community feedback is solicited have more bearing on EFIC trials’ public acceptability than the content of community feedback and the ability of biomedical research actors to transpose this content across contexts. By examining who participates in / is affected by the discursive processes through which community feedback is solicited, I help explain otherwise untheorized yet nonetheless troubling disparities between the acceptability of EFIC as determined by community consultation respondents and the acceptability of EFIC as determined by EFIC trial participants and their surrogates.

This thesis is a linguistic analysis of identity as it emerges in narratives told by local government leaders in southwest Kansas. Some communities in southwest Kansas have shifted from a majority-Anglo population to a majority-Latinx population in the last thirty years, and yet, a majority of local government leaders and business owners here are Anglo community members. This thesis specifically investigates the ways in which City Commissioners, City Managers, and city staff in two cities maintain Anglo hegemonic power through narratives about race, migration, multiculturalism and identity in the communities. Narratives about migrant identity and cowboy identity are analyzed using the frameworks of racialization and the processes of distinction, illegitimation and authorization (Bucholtz and Hall 2004).

The goal of this research is to see how spaces and bodies come to be imbued with meanings, more specifically how spaces are discursively constructed in ways that limit or allow certain types of persons to interact with the space in particular ways. By looking at how different people speak about natural areas we can understand how “American wilderness” ideologies are survived through discursive constructions of these spaces, often ignoring Indigenous communities' land relations—past and present—and producing racialized and classed imaginaries of what types of people should be interacting with nature and how. This linguistic anthropological research examines the discursive practices through which Big Sur, California, becomes imbued with semiotic relations that construct it as a racialized and classed space. Through discourse analyses of information boards and vlogs about Big Sur, and of the website of a non-profit retreat center in Big Sur, I study how dominant semiotic relations become embedded in imaginaries about the region and reproduce settler colonial structures. My analyses use linguistic anthropological theorizations of citationality and language and materiality.

California’s educational system fails to implement culturally responsive curricula that meet the standards of California Indian nations. Despite the large population of Native people in California, specifically in the southern part of the State, Native people are erased in the state’s curriculum. Parents in particular are left without agency in how their youth should be educated. This research examines how parents from two Cahuilla nations envision a culturally responsive curriculum for their youth in a public school that I refer to as T�ktam School (TS). Additionally, this work examines the role of the Cahuilla language within the curriculum. This qualitative study unites an Indigenous research framework with a Cahuilla epistemology to understand how the critical components of Cahuilla lifeways could be implemented into a curriculum. I conducted in-depth interviews with seven parents/guardians of youth who identified as Cahuilla and were current students of TS were conducted. Document analysis of the current Native program at TS and participant observation of the Native American Parent Advisory Board meetings were collected and analyzed to understand the current curriculum Native youth were receiving at TS.The central finding that resulted from this work included the lack of a culturally responsive curriculum that youth are receiving at TS despite its relatively high population of Native students and proximity to three Cahuilla nations. Through interviews, the parents demonstrated their vision of what I term a “Cahuilla Culturally Responsive Curriculum” (CCRC). Parents outlined the central place that our Cahuilla language would take in the curriculum among other crucial components. The CCRC was found to be in stark contrast to the current curriculum at TS that lacks community input and fails to include Cahuilla culture, language, or a Cahuilla teacher. Parents identified a plan for implementing the CCRC and outlined the impacts they envision the curriculum would have on their children, families, nations, the school, and their communities. This study offers a framework for future Cahuilla researchers to do community-based research that follows a Cahuilla methodology. Within academic contexts, this study adds to the growing field of research on California Indian language reclamation and educational sovereignty. This study expands the scope of culturally responsive curricula by including the voices of Native parents in their children’s education.

While some people imagine Calle Lo�za as “an exciting dynamic place to visit” filled with trendy restaurants and bars, others perceive it as a “headache” caused by “an unmeasured and unscrupulous development”. Calle Lo�za is a distinct street in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in which different class, national, and linguistic identities converge and are contested. Given its complex social fabric, I address: How is Calle Lo�za discursively constructed? What language ideologies underpin these constructions, and what subjectivities emerge? I use semiotic landscapes, or the interwoven discourses about a space, as a conceptual and methodological tool to follow the discourses that construe multiple interpretations of Calle Lo�za. Drawing from linguistic anthropological theories and grounding my analysis in the current political economic framework, this study demonstrates how Calle Lo�za is a site of ideological contestation in which differing notions of progress and sense of belonging converge.

Mysore Ashtanga yoga is a South Asian postcolonial practice recognized for its universal spiritual and physical health benefits, yet exclusively sought out and accessed by the middle and upper classes. This paper charts the work that a yoga school in the U.S undertakes in response to this apparent contradiction. Drawing on a Peircean semiotic framework, it argues that this work hinges on a semiotic labor of personalization, wherein students are taught to privilege real-time instantiations of an otherwise standardized form, and to use such signs of difference as a means to represent their self-singularity. By teaching students to recognize themselves in a generic form, the school seeks to enable universal access to an otherwise exclusionary institution, and to enact accompanying liberal ideals of self. Far from universal and straightforward as practitioners imagine, however, access and inclusion are ever-shifting targets, the result of a scalar work. Introducing yoga schools as sites of ideological work where late modern assumptions of self, body and material form are put into concerted practice, the paper situates this school’s project of reform within the contradictions immanent to a globalizing modernity.