ABOUT
Christina P. Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on multilingual education, language policy, digital practices, and youth in Sri Lanka and India. Davis received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan under the advisement of Professors Judith T. Irvine, Thomas R. Trautmann, Webb Keane, and Barbra A. Meek. Her first book, which came out of her long-term research in Sri Lanka, The Struggle for a Multilingual Future: Youth and Education in Sri Lanka (Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language, Oxford University Press, 2020), examines the tension between ethnic conflict and multilingual education policy in the linguistic and social practices of Sri Lankan minority youth. She is currently working on a project on language policy, Tamil identity, and place in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her article “The Language Politics of Aragalaya: A Multilingual Protest Movement in Postwar Sri Lanka” (Anthropological Quarterly 2025) contributes to language-focused approaches to large-scale civic movements by analyzing Sri Lankan youths’ efforts to make the 2022 Colombo-based protest movement trilingual in Sinhala, Tamil, and English.
Her forthcoming book, Mother Tongue and English: The Politics of Language in Indian Higher Education (Cambridge University Press), co-authored with Chaise LaDousa, is based on ethnographic research at higher education institutions in northern and western India from 2020 to 2024. The book is the first to examine Indian students’ reflections on mother tongue, a concept that has been pervasive since the colonial period but is rarely questioned in language and education policy and educational institutions. It also demonstrates the struggle the students face to make sense of the crucial place of English in their academic and social lives.
She recently co-edited a volume, Language, Education, and Identity: Medium in South Asia (Routledge, 2022), which examines medium of instruction in education and studies its social, economic, and political significance in the lives of people living in South Asia. She also co-edited a special issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, “Essays in Honor of Judith T. Irvine” and a special issue of Signs and Society, “Sign and Script in South Asia: Media and Semiotic Mediation,” which includes her article “Trilingual Blunders: Signboards, Social Media, and Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Publics.” Davis’s other recent work appears in Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Language & Communication, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2021; 2022; 2012).
At Western Illinois University, she teaches Anthropology 110: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology 380: Language and Culture, Anthropology 419: Anthropological Theory, and Anthropology 210: Medical Anthropology. She is Vice President of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, an editorial board member of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and an editorial advisory board member of Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology.
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