I am an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Salisbury University with a specialization in interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. My research investigates how people perceive and categorize the world around them, and how they use language and other semiotic resources to make meaning, build relationships, form identities, and navigate the complexities of their everyday lives. In my work, I have been developing theoretical frameworks for understanding human learning, meaning-making, and inter(action), and have applied them to a variety of topics ranging from socialization, multilingualism, and migration to digital communication and human–AI interaction.

My interest in language and communication goes back to my undergraduate years in Iran. Learning English had already sparked my curiosity about language, but what truly shifted my perspective was when one of my professors explained that to understand meaning we must always ask: who said what, to whom, when, where, how, and why. That insight stayed with me. It gave me a way of thinking about interaction as always embedded in layered contexts, and it has continued to guide my research. Although my early studies included translation, language teaching, theoretical linguistics, and even phonetics and phonology, I eventually gravitated toward what I had been drawn to all along: sociolinguistics and the study of language-in-interaction. My research since then has focused on how we can better account for the complexities of interaction by recognizing the dynamic, multi-layered nature of context. To do so, I emphasize spatiotemporal arrangements—people’s orientations to time and space—as central to understanding how language use, socialization, identity, and learning unfold in practice.