Home For Graduate Students The Cutting Edge: Interdisciplinary Possibilities Mary Bucholtz
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Professor, Linguistics

Mary Bucholtz’s research interests include sociocultural linguistics; language and identity; linguistic representation; language, gender, and sexuality; African American English; American Spanish; language in California.

If your research and teaching goals don't fit the traditional disciplinary mold, UCSB is the place to pursue them. UCSB truly fosters innovative interdisciplinary training, research, and teaching among its graduate students. Linguistics students, for example, regularly interact with faculty and students in at least a dozen other departments on campus through undergraduate teaching, graduate courses, Ph.D. emphases, research focus groups, and collaborative research.

The most valuable research moves scholarly inquiry in new, unexpected directions. Often this means drawing widely on the best ideas and approaches from multiple fields. Early in my career my interdisciplinary orientation was often met with puzzlement, and more than once I was admonished, "That's not linguistics!" But when I got to UCSB, I knew I was finally in the right place. My colleagues in my department and around campus weren't worried about policing disciplinary boundaries; they found my work interesting and even exciting.

Faculty and graduate students alike are drawn to UCSB because of its strong interdisciplinarity. This isn't just lip service. UCSB backs up its commitment with financial and institutional support for interdisciplinary endeavors, from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center's Research Focus Groups and funding for student and faculty collaborative research to the campus's numerous interdisciplinary Ph.D. Emphases, which allow students to add interdisciplinary breadth to their degrees.

I'm currently affiliated with two departments outside my home department, and I'm involved in two research focus groups and three Ph.D. emphases, along with a number of interdisciplinary projects with faculty and graduate students:
  • an upcoming conference on California's linguistic diversity, which brings together participants from numerous departments on campus and throughout the UC system
  • a large research study of identity and social interaction among undergraduate women and men in science, which brings together theories, methods, and concepts from linguistics, anthropology, sociology, feminist studies, education, and the sciences
  • a new initiative currently in development, to train linguistics and education graduate students through outreach in local public high school social studies classes
I find that I learn a lot more in my research and teaching when people from different disciplinary perspectives come together to address a common goal or problem. No single discipline has all the answers, and for those of us trying to understand something as complex as language in the social world, we need to draw on all the tools we can find.

My own graduate courses often include students from several other departments, and the exchange of ideas across disciplines is stimulating both for them and for the linguistics students. I strongly encourage my students to teach and take courses in other departments and to earn one or more Ph.D. emphases so they'll have the intellectual flexibility to address the big questions they'll face as scholars and teachers concerning language, culture, and society.