UCLA

The goal of this research is to see how spaces and bodies come to be imbued with meanings, more specifically how spaces are discursively constructed in ways that limit or allow certain types of persons to interact with the space in particular ways. By looking at how different people speak about natural areas we can understand how “American wilderness” ideologies are survived through discursive constructions of these spaces, often ignoring Indigenous communities' land relations—past and present—and producing racialized and classed imaginaries of what types of people should be interacting with nature and how. This linguistic anthropological research examines the discursive practices through which Big Sur, California, becomes imbued with semiotic relations that construct it as a racialized and classed space. Through discourse analyses of information boards and vlogs about Big Sur, and of the website of a non-profit retreat center in Big Sur, I study how dominant semiotic relations become embedded in imaginaries about the region and reproduce settler colonial structures. My analyses use linguistic anthropological theorizations of citationality and language and materiality.