Benjamin Bailey

My research focuses on language, culture, and social identities, particularly ethnicity and race. I am interested in negotiations of meaning and social identity in face-to-face interaction, particularly in intercultural contexts. My publications include Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity: A Study of Dominican Americans and various articles and chapters on race, code switching, bilingualism, immigration, intercultural communication, names, and street remarks.
View and download  Benjamin Bailey publications here.

Download information about our graduate focal area in Social Interaction and Culture here.

Courses Taught: 

Undergraduate: Cultural Codes in Communication; Communication, Culture, and Social identities; Studying Everyday Talk. Graduate: Introduction to Theories and Concepts of Communication; Field Methods in Social Interaction; Language, Power, and Identity

Publications: 

• Bailey, Benjamin. 2017. Greetings and compliments or street harassment?: Competing evaluations of street remarks in a recorded collection. Discourse & Society (July 2017) 28:4.
• Bailey, Benjamin. 2017. Piropos as a cultural term for talk in the Spanish-speaking world. In Donal Carbaugh (ed.) ICA Handbook of Communication in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Pp. 195-207. Taylor and Francis.
• Lie, Sunny and Benjamin Bailey. 2017. The power of names in a Chinese Indonesian family’s negotiations of politics, culture, and identities. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. 10(1), 80-95
• Bailey, Benjamin. 2016. Street remarks to women in five countries and four languages: Impositions of engagement and intimacy. Sociolinguistic Studies 10(4), 589-609
• Bailey, Benjamin. 2015. Mandarin learners’ (L2) comprehension of zero anaphora in Mandarin phone conversations. Chinese as a Second Language Research 4:2:195-217.
• Shavit, Nimrod and Benjamin Bailey. 2015. Between the Procedural and the Substantial: Democratic Deliberation and the Interaction Order in “Occupy Middletown General Assembly”. Symbolic Interaction
• Bailey, Benjamin. 2015. “Interactional Sociolinguistics”. In Tracy and Sandel (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. Pp. 826-840. Wiley.
• Sul, Eunsook and Benjamin Bailey. 2013. Negotiating Zen Buddhist and Western language ideologies and identities in a text-based, English-language online forum. Journal of Multicultural Discourse. 8:3:213-233.
• Bailey, Benjamin and Sunny Lie. 2013. The politics of names among Chinese Indonesians in Java. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Volume 23, Issue 1, pp. 21-40.
• Bailey, Benjamin. 2012. Heteroglossia. In Martin-Jones, Blackledge, and Creese (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism. Pp. 499-507. Routledge.
• Bailey, Benjamin. 2010. Language, power, and the performance of race and class. In Kathleen Korgen (ed.) Multiracial Americans and Social Class: the Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity. pp. 72-87. Routledge.
• "Interactional Sociolinguistics." 2008. International Encyclopedia of Communication. Pp. 2314-2318. New York: Blackwell Publishers.
• "Heteroglossia and boundaries". 2007. In Monica Heller (ed.), Bilingualism: Social and Political Approaches. pp. 257-274 New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
• "Shifting Negotiations of Identity in a Dominican American Community". 2007. Latino Studies. Volume 5, Number 2, pp. 157-181.
• Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity: A Study of Dominican Americans. 2002. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing.

Personal:

Professor Bailey is married to the best divorce mediator in Massachusetts, and he has 3 children, the youngest of whom started college in 2021. A recent hobby is calculators related to divorce, including this present value pension calculator for doing actuarial calculations of the value of defined benefit retirement plans..

Current Projects: 

Current research ranges from the the social means of naming practices, to cross-cultural comparisons of catcalling, to the politics of language and identity more generally.