LMS Editors

Chiho Sunakawa
Editor-in-Chief
Ph.D Student in the Linguistic Anthropology program, Department of Anthropology

Chiho's research addresses how sociocultural meanings of community are created and maintained by using different communication tools including language, gesture, and material objects in interactional spaces. Her current work explores the socialization processes of Japanese speakers in an American city by analyzing expert-novice interactions in various cultural activities. She also researches the ways in which shared knowledge is co-constructed among students of orchestral conducting.

Chiho is a graduate of the sociolinguistics program at Japan Women's University. Since she joined the University of Texas at Austin as a Fulbright graduate scholar, she has been participating in various local activities that aim to strengthen relations between Japan and the United States.

Terra Edwards
Editor-in-Chief
Ph.D Student in the Linguistic Anthropology program, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley

Terra's research interests include linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, communicative practice, folklore and public culture, iconicity, gesture, language and cognition, affect, visual culture and visual anthropology, urban anthropology, modernity, the ordinary, experimental ethnographic writing, signed languages, deaf and deaf-blind communities, and translation. Her current research focuses on communication practices in a community of people in Seattle who are both deaf and blind. These deaf-blind persons use interpreters to translate urban scenes and sounds into tactile American Sign Language as they conduct their daily affairs. She is studying these translations as a lens for examining the effects of modernity on the ways people watch, listen, and respond to news media, advertising images, and political discourse as part of their ordinary urban experience. Life in the city is full of sensory stimuli. These stimuli can include things like: a few frames of the evening news on TV at the local bar, glimpsed through the window while walking by; a pale-skinned woman, draped in a thin, black dress, sulking on the giant billboard above, seen while boarding a city bus; a pair of people walking down the sidewalk, and the way the creases in their clothes move over their muscles. In prior research, she found that details like these were treated by deaf-blind people not as background information, but as primary points of entry into shifting fields of cultural practice. In studying how members of the Seattle deaf-blind community use sign language interpreters to engage urban experiences like these, she aims to understand, more broadly, how the city and the senses come together in shaping particular kinds of thinkers, consumers, and political subjects. 

She is a graduate of The Evergreen State College and The American Sign Language and Interpreting School of Seattle, and am certified by the Board for Evaluation of Interpreters in the state of Texas. For the past ten years, she has been involved in many capacities in the deaf and deaf-blind communities of Seattle, Washington where she is currently conducting fieldwork.

Nathan Rostron

Copy Editor

In addition to his contributions for LMS, Nathan is currently working as an editorial assistant for Little, Brown and Company, in New York, NY. While in Austin, he was the Editor of the literary magazine, Bat City Review.

Eric Webb

Copy Editor

Eric is a Journalism major pursuing the Copy Editing and Design degree sequence in the College of Communication. In addition to his work for LMS, he is a freelance editor and visual designer.