Kendra Calhoun

Kendra Calhoun is an Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. As a linguistic anthropologist and sociocultural linguist, she takes a critical qualitative approach to the study of language as a social process.

In her work on social media, Calhoun explores how digital technologies create possibilities for novel forms of discourse, and how these practices are inextricably connected to "offline" identities, cultures, and ideologies. Her work on Black social media networks examines how Black digital discourse practices in the U.S. are grounded in African American language practices, racial ideologies, and political histories while embedded in a global, diasporic Black digital community and influenced by ephemeral trends of the digital age. Her current work examines 'Black TikTok' as a digital community and site of raciolinguistic construction/contestation.

Calhoun's scholarship in U.S. higher education contexts focuses on how discourses of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" function to obscure the limitations of institutional action in the face of structural inequalities. By centering members of the academy typically marginalized by DEI practices and within DEI research (graduate students of color, historically minority serving institutions), she examines how dominant DEI approaches are insufficient to address the myriad ways that inequity is baked into our institutional structures and practices.