Sarah Kugler

Dr. Sarah Kugler (she/her/hers) studies how communication, and particularly talk, functions: both at the level of linguistic form, function, and meaning, and at the level of social interaction. Her work broadly focuses on how power, identity, and language ideologies are articulated, reproduced, maintained, and challenged through language, particularly in higher education spaces and texts. Kugler’s work is often interdisciplinary, utilizing theories and methodologies from linguistics to explore pedagogical problems and questions characteristic of rhetoric and composition. She also emphasizes the importance of practical applications in her research, with the goal of seeking linguistic justice; therefore, her scholarship often includes tools readers could use to apply her findings (heuristics, suggestions for programmatic change, training modules). 

Kugler’s most recent project explores how power, identity, and language ideologies appear in talk about audience during graduate writing consultations in writing centers. Drawing on consultation transcripts, participant interviews, and participant identity surveys, and employing Critical Discourse Analysis as its methodology, she found that talk about audience is heavily integrated into the language of graduate writing consultations. She argues that audience talk often functions as a politeness strategy, that seemingly innocuous instances of audience talk can perpetuate harmful language ideologies, and that the language of audience is tacitly raced and gendered in ways which may exclude minoritized students. She was awarded the 2023 International Writing Centers Association Dissertation Grant for this project.