Hi! I’m Ty.

I’m a linguistic anthropologist who studies multimodal interaction to understand how people co-construct meaning and coordinate political action. My work spans over a decade of ethnographic research on adolescent democratic participation in Chile, as well as studies of youth language and culture in the United States.

Currently, I am a postdoc at Dartmouth College, where I’m part of the Cognitive Science Program and the SCRAP Lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. I have a PhD in Anthropology from UCLA and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Colorado.

I’m working on a book manuscript, Political Signs: Language and Student Movements in Chile, which builds on my PhD dissertation on student political participation in Santiago secondary schools. As the McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at Dartmouth, I extended this research to student movements during Chile’s military dictatorship.

Political Signs is an ethnography of youth political practice in Chile. It traces how students take political stances through communicative acts across linguistic, embodied, and visual modalities, where 'political signs' surface in classroom interactions, street protests, historical narratives, and archival materials spanning Chile's transition from dictatorship to democracy. Telescoping between the fine-grained organization of situated interaction and the decades-long arc of pro-democracy student movements, the book shows how democratic practice is built through everyday semiotic encounters, socialized across generations, and mobilized as young people confront authoritarian threats.