Hi! I’m Ty.

My work centers mundane social interaction as the medium through which people co-construct meaning, organize relationships, and participate in political life. It spans over a decade of ethnographic research on youth democratic participation in Chile, as well as studies of youth language and culture in the United States. In both research and teaching, I integrate methods from Anthropology, Linguistics, and Cognitive Science.

I have a PhD in Anthropology from UCLA and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Colorado. I’m currently a postdoc at Dartmouth College, where I’m part of the SCRAP Lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

I’m working on a book manuscript, Political Signs: Language and Student Movements in Chile. The project brings together my PhD dissertation and postdoctoral research supported through Dartmouth’s Department of Anthropology.

Political Signs is an ethnography of youth political practice. The book traces how students in Chile take political stances through communicative acts across linguistic, embodied, and visual modalities. It follows the ‘political signs’ that constitute these stances in classroom interactions, street protests, and historical materials spanning Chile's transition from dictatorship to democracy, telescoping between the fine-grained organization of situated interaction and the decades-long arc of pro-democracy student movements. In doing so, the book shows how everyday ephemeral encounters accumulate into lasting political formations, and how successive generations of youth acquire a shared repertoire of democratic resistance.