Agrigento (Sicily)

gabriella licata

/ gabriˈɛl:a liˈkata /

she ~ ella ~ lei ~ lê

glicata (at) ucr (dot) edu

Photo cred to my sis, Daniela Imahara

I am a linguist and mentor at UC Riverside, where I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in Spanish Critical Sociolinguistics and Language Education at the LatCrit Sociocultural Linguistics Lab in the Center for Ideas and Society. I received my PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UC Berkeley, where I completed a dissertation entitled, Investigating Deficit Perspectives and Raciolinguistic Ideologies Through Language Attitude Study under the advising of Dr. Justin Davidson, wherein I use a raciolinguistic perspective to examine how listening subjects use their perceptions of race, gender, and alleged 'deficits' to form language attitudes.  I use both qualitative and experimental approaches to reveal how individuals' and groups' perception and use of language are ideologically charged.


I am also a researcher at  San Quentin Prison through Mount Tamalpais College, where Student Researchers and I are investigating the sociolinguistic labor of incarcerated people (CPHS Protocol #2022-220). In this project, we use Participatory Action Research to include the experts of the prison system (i.e., incarcerated people) in the research project. Our ultimate goals are to provide incarcerated students with new opportunities and bring experiences from inside the prison to the forefront of [socio]linguistic research and offer research experience to those who are underrepresented in the process.