Jennifer Roth-Gordon

Jennifer Roth-Gordon is a linguistic anthropologist who has been conducting research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil since 1995. Her current book manuscript, Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro (University of California Press, 2017) explores how racial ideas about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness continue to play out in the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s residents. Her new research project, entitled Bodies of Privilege: Cultivating Wealth and Whiteness in Rio de Janeiro, investigates how race and class privilege are constructed and lived by Rio's whiter middle and upper-middle classes and how this privilege is taught and handed down to one’s children.

Research Interests:  Linguistic anthropology; race and everyday practice; whiteness; language, culture, and power; language ideologies; ethnographic discourse analysis; Brazil