Researcher biography

I'm a linguistic anthropologist who studies how communicative events in Indonesia figure in the building and maintenance of social relationships and common knowledge among Indonesians. During my PhD and post-PhD early years my research often involved long periods of fieldwork in Indonesia. As research funding and sabbatical have become scarce, I have increasingly turned to publically available data, such as Indonesian films, newspapers, social media and so on. I have published extensively on my research, including Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighbourhood Talk in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2015), Global Leadership Talk: Constructing Good Governance in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2020); Reimagining Rapport (Oxford University Press, 2021); Rapport and the discursive co-construction of social relations in fieldwork settings (Mouton De Gruyter, 2019); and Contact Talk: The Discursive Organization of Contact and Boundaries (with Deborah Cole and Howard Manns, Routledge, 2020).