Home Department: Anthropology
SLAT Area of Specialization: Sociocultural Dimensions of L2 Learning
Jennifer Roth-Gordon is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist who has been conducting research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil since 1995. Her first book, Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro (University of California Press, 2017) explores how racial ideas about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness continue to play out in the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s residents. Her current book project, entitled Precious White Lives: Middle-Class Parenting and the Protection of Whiteness in Rio de Janeiro, tells the story of how "good parenting" entails the shoring up of racial privilege through the hypervaluation and protection of white life, white well-being, and white comfort.
Research Interests: Linguistic anthropology; anthropology of race and racism; critical whiteness studies; language, culture, and power; language ideologies; ethnographic discourse analysis; Brazil