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Welcome! I recently moved to Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, where I began working as an assistant professor of Communication this fall.
My research has focused primarily on the experiences of new immigrant families in adapting to their new local environments. As the numbers of newly arrived individuals and families continue to reconfigure the meaning of community in the world’s major urban centers, Los Angeles provided me with a perfect natural laboratory for investigating a local phenomenon being reproduced worldwide, and I’m looking forward to conducting research around these same issues in New York and New Jersey.
Immigration is intimately intertwined with the development and proliferation of an ever-widening range of communication technologies that facilitate connections across borders, across a new community, and within family and interpersonal networks. The communicative processes that underlie the immigration experience are the nexus of my research interests, including:
- The media (mainstream, ethnic, community) that immigrants and their families connect with as their guide to their new local environment;
- How families navigate information resources to make meaningful connections with health care resources, social services, and schools, and how those connections are/are not maintained over time;
- Language negotiation in families and children’s roles as linguistic and cultural brokers;
- Intergroup communication dynamics between long-settled residents and immigrant newcomers; and
- Relationships between family interaction and civic engagement (including political participation, collective efficacy, and community belonging)
