Christina P. Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western Illinois University. Her research and teaching interests concern intersections between language and media practices, multilingual education, and conflict, with a geographical focus on 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), examines the tension between ethnic conflict and multilingual education policy in the linguistic and social practices of Sri Lankan minority youth. She recently co-edited a book, 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 recently 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 the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Language & Communication, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2021; 2022; 2012). Her current work examines the multilingual policies, digital practices, and Tamil-speaking youth in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is also collaborating with Chaise LaDousa on a project on ideologies of mother tongue and English in South Asia. 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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