Christina P. Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Western Illinois University. She is a linguistic anthropologist focusing on multilingual education, language policy, and digital practices in Sri Lanka and India. Davis received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan under the advisement of Professors Judith T. Irvine, Thomas R. Trautmann, Webb Keane, and Barbra A. Meek. Her first book, The Struggle for a Multilingual Future: Youth and Education in Sri Lanka (Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language, Oxford University Press, 2020), examines the tension between ethnic conflict and multilingual education policy in the linguistic and social practices of Sri Lankan minority youth. Her second book, “Mother Tongue and English: The Politics of Language in Indian Higher Education” (Under contract, Cambridge University Press), co-authored with Chaise LaDousa, incorporates interviews at three higher education institutions in western and northern India to examine how students imagine mother tongue in relation to English. Davis is also working on a long-term project on language policy, Tamil identity, and place in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her forthcoming article, “The Language Politics of Aragalaya: A Multilingual Protest Movement in Postwar Sri Lanka” (Anthropological Quarterly 2025) looks at Sri Lankan youths’ efforts to make the 2022 Colombo-based protest movement trilingual in Sinhala, Tamil, and English.
She recently co-edited a volume, Language, Education, and Identity: Medium in South Asia (Routledge, 2022), which examines medium of instruction in education and studies its social, economic, and political significance in the lives of people living in South Asia. She also co-edited a special issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, “Essays in Honor of Judith T. Irvine” and a special issue of Signs and Society, “Sign and Script in South Asia: Media and Semiotic Mediation,” which includes her article “Trilingual Blunders: Signboards, Social Media, and Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Publics.” Davis’s other recent work appears in Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Language & Communication, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2021; 2022; 2012). At Western Illinois University she teaches Anthropology 110: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology 380: Language and Culture, Anthropology 419: Anthropological Theory, and Anthropology 210: Medical Anthropology. She is an editorial board member of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and an editorial advisory board member of Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology.
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