Karl Swinehart
Biography
My research interests intersect multilingualism in popular culture, media studies, and language politics. My work examines how linguistic practices intersect with processes of social change, asking how language shapes belonging and solidarity along diverse axes of difference: race and nation, urban and rural, local and diasporic. My first book, Voice and Nation in Plurinational Bolivia: Aymara Radio and Song in an Age of Pachakuti (Bloomsbury 2024), draws on research conducted among Bolivian Aymara-language recording artists, educators, and media professionals between 2006 and 2019. A sustained thread within my research concerns popular music in social movements, from Norway in the 1970s to Bolivia and the US today. My background in language education and applied linguistics includes having begun my career as a Spanish-English bilingual teacher in the LA Unified School District, collaborations with Bolivian bilingual educators, and ongoing work with the late Roger Anderson’s Quechua language instructional materials from the UCLA Quechua Project. Prior to coming to UCLA, I taught in the linguistics program at the University of Louisville and was a collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where I taught “Language and the Human.”
I am involved in organizing the Language in Society seminar at the Inter University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia. At UCLA, I am an affiliate of the Latin American Institute, the Andean Workgroup, and Discourse Lab.
Research Interests
Multilingualism and the public sphere; popular music; verbal art and performance; poetics; register; genre; semiotics; language politics; language and the professions; discourse analysis and the archive; Indigenous languages of the Americas (Aymara and Quechua); Scandinavia
Publications
Book
Swinehart, Karl. 2024. Voice and Nation in Plurinational Bolivia: Aymara Radio and Song in an age of Pachakuti. Bloomsbury Studies in Linguistic Anthropology.
Edited Volumes
Swinehart, Karl and Anna Browne Ribeiro. 2019. “When Time Matters.” Special issue, Signs and Society 7, no. 1.
Swinehart, Karl and Kathryn Graber. 2012. “Languages and Publics in Stateless Nations.” Special issue, Language & Communication 32, no. 2.
Book Chapters
Swinehart, Karl. 2018. “Footing and Role Alignment Online: Mediatized Indigeneity and Andean Hip-Hop.” In Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication, edited by Cecelia Cutler and Unn Røyneland, 168–85. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Swinehart, Karl. 2018. “Language and Media.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, edited by John L. Jackson, Jr. Oxford University Press.
Journal Articles
Swinehart, Karl. 2025. “Text, Transit, and Transformation.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 48(1): 137-156 (2025).
Swinehart, Karl (with Sonja Moghaddari). 2020. “À propos du panel ‘Temporalités conflictuelles dans l’anthropologie du futur’ à la conférence EASA, en ligne, 21 et 22 juillet 2020.” Lectures Anthropologiques: Revue de comptes rendues critiques no. 7. https://www.lecturesanthropologiques.fr/823
Swinehart, Karl. 2019. “The Ch’ixi Blackness of Nación Rap’s Aymara Hip-Hop.” In “Music, Indigeneity, and Colonialism in the Americas,” edited by Jessica Bissett Perea and Gabriel Solis. Special issue, Journal of the Society for American Music 13, no. 4: 461–81.
Swinehart, Karl. 2019. With Anna Browne Ribeiro. “When Time Matters.” In “When Times Matters,” edited by Karl F. Swinehart and Anna Browne Ribeiro. Special issue, Signs and Society 7, no. 1: 1–5.
Swinehart, Karl. 2019. “Decolonial Time in Bolivia’s Pachakuti.” In “When Times Matters,” edited by Karl F. Swinehart and Anna Browne Ribeiro. Special issue, Signs and Society 7, no. 1: 96–114.
Swinehart, Karl. 2018. “Gender, Race, Class, and Region in ‘Bilingual’ Bolivia.” Signs and Society 6, no. 3: 607–21.
Swinehart, Karl. 2018. “The Road as a National Chronotope in Bolivian Film.” In “Production of Cinematic Space,” edited by Kathryn Hardy. Special issue, Wide Screen 7, no. 1: 1–21.
Swinehart, Karl. 2015. “Los protocolos de la pureza y el Aymara deshispanizado en la Radio San Gabriel” [Protocols of purity and dehispanicized Aymara on Radio San Gabriel]. Umbrales, no. 29: 299–330.
Swinehart, Karl. 2012. “The Enregisterment of Colla in a Bolivian (Camba) Comedy.” Social Text, no. 113: 81–102.
Swinehart, Karl. 2012. “Metadiscursive Regime and Register Formation on Aymara Radio.” Language & Communication 32, no. 2 (April 2012): 102–13.
Swinehart, Karl and Kathryn Graber. 2012. “Tongue-Tied Territories: Languages and Publics in Stateless Nations.” Language & Communication 32, no. 2: 95–97.
Swinehart, Karl. 2012. “Tupac in their Veins: Hip-Hop Alteño and the Semiotics of Urban Indigeneity.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 16: 79–96.
Swinehart, Karl. 2008. “The Mass-Mediated Chronotope, Radical Counterpublics, and Dialect in 1970s Norway: The Case of Vømmøl Spellmanslag.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18, no. 2 (September 2008): 290–301.
Awards & Grants
Faculty Fellow, Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society, University of Louisville, 2018
Co-chair, Society of Fellows, University of Chicago, 2013
Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Chicago, 2012
Fulbright Hays Scholar for Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, 2010
Predoctoral Fellow, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2009
Degrees
PhD Anthropology and Education, University of Pennsylvania (2012)
MA Applied Linguistics, UCLA (2006)
BS Rural Sociology and Latin American Studies, University of Wisconsin - Madison (1998)