I'm a linguistic anthropologist who studies how communicative events in Indonesia figure in the building and maintenance of social relationships and common knowledge among Indonesians. During my PhD and post-PhD early years my research often involved long periods of fieldwork in Indonesia. As research funding and sabbatical have become scarce, I have increasingly turned to publically available data, such as Indonesian films, newspapers, social media and so on. I have published extensively on my research, including Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighbourhood Talk in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2015), Global Leadership Talk: Constructing Good Governance in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2020); Reimagining Rapport (Oxford University Press, 2021); Rapport and the discursive co-construction of social relations in fieldwork settings (Mouton De Gruyter, 2019); and Contact Talk: The Discursive Organization of Contact and Boundaries (with Deborah Cole and Howard Manns, Routledge, 2020).
I am an applied linguist specializing in intercultural and public health communication. I am deeply engaged in using multimodal discourse analysis to understand how language, gestures, eye gaze, and material objects co-create meaning in social life. Previously, I investigated the processes of language and cultural learning in both study abroad and classroom settings.
My recent work focuses on communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have published in top-tier international journals on public health topics, including mask wearing as well as reporting and narrating pandemic events. My COVID-19 project draws on over 600 hours of press-conference recordings and more than two million public online comments to understand what worked and did not in public health crisis communication. In 2025, I published a research monograph, Health crisis communication: Multimodal classification for pandemic preparedness. The book examines the role of multimodal classification in promoting pandemic preparedness and provides a list of ready-to-use strategies for explaining pandemic categories to the public.
My new project examines the communication of food safety crises, such as the rice noodle poisoning incident in Taiwan. I am writing my second monograph titled Numbers talk in health crisis discourse. The book analyzes how during public health emergencies, such as a mass food poisoning incident, public health professionals used communication to infuse statistics with qualitative meanings. Through talk about numbers, the professionals shape social perception of and response to a health emergency.
My research on public health communication received the 2021 Humanities Traveling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the 2025 Young Scholar Research Award from the North America Taiwanese Professors' Association (NATPA). I aim to use my research to help health professionals effectively communicate public health and update health communication guidelines.
I am available to supervise PhD/MPhil/Honours projects on the following topics: health discourses, intercultural communication, and language learning and teaching. Please contact me to discuss your proposal.
