About

Dr. Theresa Austin’s research draws on critical race and sociocultural theories to examine language and literacy policies and planning for multilingual learners.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Psychology
• Humanities
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• History
• Gender studies
• Mathematics education
• Philosophy
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• What, Me a Racist?

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2026-04-14

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• Ethics for Researching Language and Education: What the Discourse of Professional Guidelines Reveals

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

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• Ethics for researching language and education: What the discourse of professional guidelines reveals

  Research Methods in Applied Linguistics · 2025-06-02 · 3 citations

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  How do the guidelines provided by language and literacy professional organizations configure the ethical stances of their members, who are practitioners and researchers? As part of a larger project involving the lived experiences of teacher educators and researchers who work with multilingual populations, we present an initial critical discourse study of four professional organizations’ ethical codes of conduct. This article focuses on ethics as it materializes through contemporary textual analysis of public guidelines readily accessible to educational linguistics professionals during the 2021–2024 timeframe. It examines how ethical statements operate on the imagination of professionals desiring membership. We employ critical discourse analysis (CDA), where Van Dijk’s (1993) definition of discourse conceptualizes how language use creates power to dominate, resist, and build social hierarchies. We characterize each code as within deontic ethics by interpreting how the choice of modality guides members’ actions and values. During 2021–24 our corpus included documents detailing guidelines from AERA (2011), MLA (1992), LRA (2016), and AAAL (2017). Our findings highlight the characteristics of these ethical codes and their differences. These documents configure an assemblage that affects members through assumed values and obligations. Furthermore, we identify unexamined ethical needs that arise in actual lived realities of researchers that require more fluid, contingent, and responsive ethics; hence, we propose a critically and dialogically engaged stance open to periodic yet continual reformulations.

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• 1 Introduction to Critical CALL across Institutions and Borders

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2025-07-23

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• 5 Using Technology and Art in a Middle School Exploratory Heritage Language Program: Diversity Matters

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2025-07-23

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• 275Afterword: Towards an ethics praxis—theorizing and acting on ethics in L2 pedagogy and research

  2025-06-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• 1Introduction: Engaging with ethics in multilingual education and researching

  2025-06-04

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• Teachers inquiring into translanguaging and multimodal pedagogies: emerging creative and critical entanglements during transnational professional development

  2023-12-20 · 2 citations

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• Learning and teaching trans-inclusive language and register hybridity for multilingual writers

  Language Awareness · 2023 · 6 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Pedagogy
  • Psychology

  In multilingual instructional spaces, language use can reinforce or ­disrupt gender disparities. This self-study, situated in the context of a university developmental English writing course, examines how an instructor sought to raise L2 learners’ critical language awareness, operationalized as consciousness of ways that gender disparity is mediated by and through language. It also explores how one L2 Chinese learner, Wesheng, explored transgender themes and register during a curricular unit in this course. Focusing on Wesheng’s written and oral discourse, we illustrate the process through which his instructor developed a deeper understanding of his register-use. Data sources include writing samples, curricular materials, the instructor’s journal and feedback, and a semi-structured learner interview. Analyzing these sources through register and performance perspectives, we show how the learner exhibited hybridity in ‘en-gendered’ and academic registers of English and performed egalitarian and multilingual voices as he interacted with instructional resources. We conclude the article with discussions on the affordances of using register analysis to support critical language writing pedagogies and instructional strategies that teachers can use to cultivate L2 students’ socio-sexual literacies.

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• The Manifestations and Constraints of Equity Materials on Undergraduate L2 Students’ Writing Development

  Educational linguistics · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Emma R. Britton

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  10 shared

• Bridget Backhaus

  Griffith University

  9 shared

• Julie Byrd

  Western University

  9 shared

• Jessica Chandras

  University of North Florida

  9 shared

• Sara Ganassin

  Newcastle University

  9 shared

• Rosa Alejandra Medina Riveros

  5 shared

• Yoshiko Saito‐Abbott

  5 shared

• Haji Karim Khan

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Lifetime Achievement award from ISLS
• Selected to Join European Union Linguistic Research Working…