2013
In May of 2013, at the UALR College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, I was awarded the Stonewall Scholarship. The award is privately funded and given by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Each year a recipient is chosen for their dedication to LGBT issues, knowledge of LGBT history and current issues, their activism, and community involvement.
In April of 2013, I presented at the UALR Graduate Research and Creative Works Expo again. My project, "Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Tweets and Posts Might #Kill @Me: Speech Act Theory and Homophobic Cyber-Bullying," examines homophobic cyber-bullying as a series of speech acts according to Austin and Searle's works. The project won second place.
In March of 2013, I partnered with the UALR Department of English and the Linguistics and Language Arts Working Group to give a lecture on my sociolinguistics research and on student research resources.
2012
In 2012 I presented at the UALR Graduate Research and Creative Works Expo. My project was titled: "A Comparative Study of Professional Ethics for American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreters in the United States and Österreichische Gebädensprache (ÖGS, Austrian Sign Language) Interpreters in Austria." I collected the data for this project while abroad in Graz, Austria completing a research-oriented internship at Karl-Franzens Universität.
I also presented at the UALR International Celebration Day. The project I presented here was titled: "Communication in Higher Education Settings in the United States: Interactions between Students from India and Faculty from the United States." This project focused on how differences in Geert Hofstede's dimensions of culture can create tensions, and Oetzel and Pearce's layered model of intercultural communication can be employed to work through those tensions.
2011
That project won first place in the expo, and eventually led to my first publication in a refereed journal.
