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My ethnographic research on linguistic practice in India has shaped a series of articles with Mary Bucholtz on the relationship between language and identity. Synthesizing insights from diverse fields focused on language as social practice, we developed a framework around a view of identity as a social and cultural phenomenon rather than a primarily internal psychological one. For us, identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic practice. It is a dynamic, context-dependent social product that emerges in interaction.

Our framework emphasizes that analyzing language practice requires considering both macro-levels of discourse (such as language alternation, topic choice, or stance-taking) and micro-levels of linguistic structure (including phonology, morphology, lexis, and grammar). We advocate for an interdisciplinary approach that integrates subfields specializing in the analysis of these different levels, such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, sociophonetics, and variationist sociolinguistics. In our 2008 article All of the Above, we term this united field sociocultural linguistics, a label that has gained increasing traction among scholars expanding the traditional contours of these subfields. 

We anchor this framework in interaction and in what we call the tactics of intersubjectivity — the local, situated, and improvised ways individuals navigate social constraints to position themselves in relation to one another. Articles detailing this framework include Theorizing Identity in Language and Sexuality Research (2004), Language and Identity (2004), Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach (2005), and Locating Identity in Language (2010). We have since extended this model to encompass methods, politeness, and embodiment in works such as Finding Identity (2008), Facing Identity (2013), and Embodied Sociolinguistics (2018).

My work advances an indexical model of identity that I have found especially illuminating for the study of gender and sexuality. In "It's a Hijra": Queer Linguistics Revisited (2013), I compare how identity is viewed in queer theoretical work with the way identity is viewed in sociocultural linguistics, preferring the latter for its focus on identity as a multilayered, shifting phenomenon that is created anew in every act of discourse. My collaboration with Rusty Barrett, Sexuality Discourses: Indexical Misrecognition and the Politics of Sex (2024), is a social semiotic exploration of how clashes in indexical systems drive contemporary transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist political ideologies.

In other work, I examine how globalization impacts the relationship between language and identity. Publications in this area include my article Hypersubjectivity (2014), which explores the anxiety transnational subjects face when navigating a global economy, and a coauthored article with Chad Nilep, Code-Switching, Identity, and Globalization (2015), which reviews how theories of identity have shifted under globalization and shaped research on code-switching. The intersection of identity and globalization is central to my research on language, gender, and sexuality in India, described at the link to the right.