She is a sociolinguistic by training. Her areas of research include language policy and planning in education, language development, and the historiography of isiXhosa literature. She has collaborated with researchers in disciplines such as medicine, law, education, media and computer science. Encouraged by her personal experience, and present debates in South African higher education on the marginalisation of indigenous ways of knowing, her present research project investigates language as a source of evidence for reconstructing the sociocultural past of the isiXhosa-speaking society, and making sense of the present. Maseko has published in both local and international journals and books, and is a co-editor of the UKZN isiXhosa Literature Series that publishes works of early isiXhosa literature that appeared in newspapers from the 1830s to the 1940s.