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.