Alexandra Nichole Salazar

Alexandra Nichole Salazar (she/ella) is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She holds a PhD from the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at University of Texas, Austin. Her research focuses on queer border life, performance, iconographies, oral histories, and archives. Her book manuscript, Malcriada Archiving: Queer Worldmaking Culture in the Borderlands, theorizes how queer communities across the U.S.–Mexico borderlands resist dominant archival practices and instead generate their own narratives, epistemologies, and cultural forms. She is the creator and host of Jotxs y Recuerdos, a podcast/archive dedicated to documenting queer histories, cultural expressions, and ephemera from the Rio Grande Valley (Somi Se’k) and other liminal spaces. Salazar is also part of various collectives and projects that are centered around decolonial education/archiving: Malflora Collective, Sandovalian Semillero Collective, and Mapping Violence.

Website: https://alexandranicholesalazar.com

Adrienne Tsikewa

Adrienne Tsikewa (Zuni Pueblo) is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a MA in Native American Languages and Linguistics (NAMA) from the University of Arizona. Her research interests include language documentation and description, language revitalization and reclamation, sociocultural linguistics, applied linguistics, bilingualism, code-switching, and Native American studies. She is from Denver, CO and her maternal family is from Zuni Pueblo, NM.

Her dissertation examined Zuni-English bilingualism, family language practices, and language ideologies with respect to adult Zuni tribal members. During the fellowship period she plans to utilize the bilingual interviews from her dissertation in order to: (1) describe Zuni morphosyntax, or word and sentence structure, and (2) describe Zuni-English code-switching. This research will provide information on the specific grammatical structures younger generations and/or receptive bilinguals use and how these differ from the language use of older, Zuni-dominant speakers, in the hopes that it will contribute to awareness of actual language use in the community, language revitalization efforts and, ultimately, intergenerational language transmission amongst more families. This research can also be applied to examining bilingual first language acquisition and language socialization, crucial areas of investigation needed for language revitalization and maintenance efforts.

Her mentor is Dr. Wesley Leonard, and they have previously worked together to develop and promote decolonial strategies to better incorporate Native American and other Indigenous needs and values about language into linguistic science. This initiative is known as Natives4Linguistics, and is a Special Interest Group of the Linguistic Society of America. She has also been involved with the biennial Institute of Collaborative Language Research (CoLang), which trains individuals, both Indigenous community members and non-Indigenous peoples, who are interested in community-based language work. She is currently the Program Administrator for the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).