Research and projects

I ask how the appropriation and commodification of trans-inclusion by online platforms is used to construct corporations as sympathetic subjects, furthering their ability to gather, own, and profit from user data and distracting from their role in perpetuating inequality through global capitalism. I use a variety of approaches from Anthropology, Linguistics, and Digital Humanities, to analyze the public-facing discourses and practices of adding ‘pronoun field’ features in these platforms, trans people’s reactions to trans-inclusive features, and trans workers and activists’ perspectives on the interactional construction of these features. The project advances the emergent field of Trans Linguistics, which originated in my department at UCSB. This work has been supported by competitive funding, including UCSB’s year-long Graduate Humanities Research Fellowship for 2024-2025, and the support I received as a fellow with UCSB’s Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies during 2023-2024, for which I created public-facing content such as videos, zines, and podcast episodes related to my research.

In my work on in-person pronoun sharing practices, I showed that their generative potential is constrained by relations of power through the analysis of interviews, workshops, and surveys. I began this work during my undergraduate degree in Australia and further developed it throughout graduate school. I have presented this research at a range of venues including the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association, published a co-authored chapter in the 2024 Oxford University Press volume Inclusion in Linguistics (Zimman & Brown 2024), and an article in a Trans Linguistics Special Issue of Gender and Language (Brown forthcoming), for which I am one of the guest editors and which also includes my co-authored introduction on the field of Trans Linguistics (Brown, Zimman & miles-hercules forthcoming).

In my research on the creation and upholding of language norms in an early online transmasc community, I use a mixed-methods approach to explore patterns of language change, showing the large influence of linguistic, interactional, and identity norms that are negotiated and enforced by highly active users, who drive language change by providing a model to which users are expected to comply. I developed this research for my Master’s Thesis as well as a paper with my advisers which is under submission to the Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Brown, Zimman, & Todd under review).