Natasha Shrikant is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
She uses ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches to analyze relationships between communication and identity. She focuses mostly on how participants’ interactions explicitly or implicitly construct social identities such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as relevant to interactional contexts. Most recently, she worked on a project examining how institutional members construct racial and ethnic identities as constitutive of professional identities in various institutional speech events, such as meetings, public speeches, and informal workplace conversations. She is also interested in how institutional members build interethnic or cross cultural relationships in an effort to meet institutional goals.
Sample Publications:
Shrikant, N. (2015). The discursive construction of race as a professional identity category in two Texas chambers of commerce. International Journal of Business Communication, 1-24. doi: 10.1177/2329488415594156.
Shrikant, N. (2015). “Yo, it’s IST yo”: The discursive construction of an Indian-American youth identity in a South Asian Student Club. Discourse and Society, 26(4), 480-501.
Shrikant, N. (2014). “It’s like, ‘I’ve never met a lesbian before!’”: Personal narratives and the construction of diverse female identities in a lesbian counterpublic. IPrA Pragmatics, 24(4), 799-818.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 