James Collins

I am an anthropologist and linguist by training. My research typically engages discourse analysis with social theory, combining analysis of linguistic practices with ethnographic research oriented to theoretical debates about power, identity and inequality. For several decades, I have studied issues of language diversity, social identity, and the politics of language in rural Native American communities, multi-ethnic urban communities in the U.S. and, most recently, multilingual migrant communities in Belgium, upstate New York, and South Africa.