Research
In my research, I have examined how people’s movement across time and space reshapes their linguistic practices, identities, and ideologies. I have published multiple articles on language, identity, and migration, showing how narratives of mobility reveal recalibrated indexical systems that guide multilingual practices and social belonging. This line of inquiry was expanded into a monograph, Chronotopes and Migration: Language, Social Imagination, and Behavior (Routledge, 2021; co-authored with Lydia Catedral), which develops a systematic framework for analyzing how chronotopes—literally, space-times—organize social life and communicative practice. The book demonstrates how orientations to space and time shape the ways migrants imagine home and host societies, negotiate belonging and marginality, and make sense of their everyday interactions. It has been well received by both established and emerging scholars and was recognized as a finalist for the 2023 First Book Award of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.
In my later work, I have proposed understanding social learning and socialization as processes of constructing images of spatiotemporal surroundings. Learning, in this view, is a process of building resolution—gradually adding more detail and texture to the images we construct of our material and imagined environments. These images, in turn, guide our understandings of normalcy, regularity, and patterns of behavior. I have used this approach to examine multilingual socialization, showing how multilingual speakers develop and refine their sense of appropriate language choice across contexts. Along with colleagues, I have further developed this system into a framework that identifies three interrelated elements at the core of interaction and learning: chronotopic textualities (linguistic and non-linguistic signs sequenced in time and space), imaginaries (the spatiotemporal images people construct and reconstruct), and materialities (the embodied, affective, and physical conditions of interaction). Together, these elements account for how individuals orient to their environments and how meaning-making unfolds. I have applied this perspective to contexts such as survival during COVID-19, where interactional practices were shaped simultaneously by symptoms, medical reports, digital news, and everyday exchanges.
My ongoing research continues to expand these ideas in multiple directions, and I have increasingly engaged more closely with the concept of fractality, which I have drawn on and extended through mathematical, biological, sociological, and anthropological traditions. Simply put, fractality allows me to account for the spatiotemporal, scalar, iterative, and interconnected patterns of social and linguistic life, tracing how meaning-making unfolds across both material and social worlds. This has led me to develop what I call a fractal system of learning and interaction, a framework for understanding how spacetime of social life and the associated normative patterns are recursively constructed and reconfigured across scales of activity. Together with Lydia Catedral, I am using this system to theorize issues such as care in transnational contexts and the dynamics of grassroots advocacy. With Mahbubeh Moqadam, I am applying this framework to the study of social movements and transformation, examining how Gen Z youth in Iran construct chronotopic images of “normal life” that shape their imaginaries of change and possibilities for collective action. I also use this system to account for human–AI interaction, exploring how AI-generated language produces meaning and disruption in ways that both parallel and diverge from human interaction. This recent work on fractality, materiality, and the spatiotemporality of social life and interaction forms the foundation for my second co-authored monograph, which develops these themes into a comprehensive system of understanding.