Research Interests
Linguistic Anthropology and Sociolinguistics, Cultural Anthropology, African Diaspora Studies
- race, semiotics, digital space, personhood, gender, discourse, language ideology, hip hop, migration, Africa, Liberia, US
Research Description
I study the semiosis of race (raciosemiotics) in young people's lives by conducting ethnographic research in different locations of Black Diaspora (mostly digital or urban). My work specifically concerns the discourses and practices that constitute Blackness, antiblackness, and anti-antiblackness.
One of my recent projects concerning digital subjectivity and sociality (there are a few) considers how uses of "emphatically Black" and "intentionallly Black" language and discourse in digital space function as public refusals of antiblack "raciolinguistic ideologies" (Rosa & Flores 2017) and semiotically, may help reracialize public spaces and reconfigure racialized signs in significant ways. Another project in development examines uses of Black bodies in reaction memes/gifs and of Black body parts in internet-mediated images by non-Black people and situates these recursive digital practices within a timeline of slavery and its afterlife (following Saidiya Hartman's retemporalization of the present), and therefore within a history of corporeal theft (specifically, different practices of possession, body-snatching, dismemberment).
I've worked extensively with young urbanites in Monrovia, Liberia and Philadelphia, PA in the US, and I'm in the early stages of a new project with my cultural community: the Gullah/Geechee of coastal and insular South Carolina.
Education
PhD, University of Pennsylvania (2015)
BS, Cornell University (2000)
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Acting Director of Graduate Studies, Anthropology
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Associate Professor, Center for African Studies
External Links
Highlighted Publications
My monograph Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora (Oxford University Press) is in press and I recently co-authored a chapter with Jenny L. Davis called 'Language and Racism' for the forthcoming The New Wiley Blackwell Companion to Linguistic Anthropology edited by Alessandro Duranti, Robin Conley Riner, and Rachel George.
Recent Publications
Smalls, K. A., & Davis, J. L. (2023). Language and Racism. In A. Duranti, R. George, & R. C. Riner (Eds.), A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 560-576). (Wiley Blackwell Companions to Anthropology). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119780830.ch31
Davis, J. L., & Smalls, K. A. (2021). Dis/possession Afoot: American (Anthropological) Traditions of Anti‐Blackness and Coloniality. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2), 275-282. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12327
Smalls, K. A. (2021). Fat, Black, and Ugly: The Semiotic Production of Prodigious Femininities. Transforming Anthropology, 29(1), 12-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12208
Smalls, K. A., Spears, A. K., & Rosa, J. (2021). Introduction: Language and White Supremacy. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2), 152-156. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12329
Smalls, K. A. (2021). Introduction to the Forum on Language and Anti‐Blackness. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2), 258-260. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12328