Shannon Ward

Assistant Professor

Community, Culture & Global Studies

Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Research Themes: 

Language, Sustainability and Transnationalism

Shannon Ward is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, in the Department of Community, Culture, and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.

She is trained as a linguistic anthropologist (Ph.D. New York University 2019), and specializes in the study of language acquisition and socialization, multilingualism, language shift, and language documentation. Her research program addresses how children acquire languages alongside cultural practices, especially in situations of social change and language shift.

Over the past ten years, she has been investigating the relationships among migration, urbanization, and language shift in multilingual Tibetan families living in western China and North America.

Research interests: Language Acquisition and Socialization; Multilingualism; Language Shift; Language Documentation; Tibetan.