Dr. Shannon Ward

Biography

Shannon Ward is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community, Culture, and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She is a trained linguistic anthropologist who earned her Ph.D. from New York University in 2019. Her research specializes in the study of language acquisition and socialization, multilingualism, language shift, and language documentation. Over the past decade, she has focused on the relationships between migration, urbanization, and language shift within multilingual Tibetan families living in western China and North America. Her scholarship addresses how children acquire languages alongside cultural practices, especially in contexts of social change and language shift.

Research Interests