Department of Anthropology

Dr. Tiffany Marquise Jones is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist dedicated to advocacy research, which she uses to promote and produce inclusive pedagogies as well as create visual artifacts that showcase the richness of African American Language (AAL) and Verbal Arts Traditions and other performances for academic and public audiences.

Her background reveals that often life is a winding road to finding one's passion. After an internship for an Information Systems degree led her back to graduate school for my MA in Rhetoric and Composition, she discovered one of her greatest joys: teaching novice writers to wield the power of the pen. Through Dr. Jones’s tenure as an instructor of Composition, she found the need to advocate for linguistic (language) diversity in and outside of the classroom. So, she began focusing on African American Vernacular English, specifically its negative depiction in the media and resulting in-group resistance. This led her to obtain a MA in Linguistics. However, this work proved to be very disheartening and demoralizing. And instead, she decided to focus on the positive perspective of African American Language (AAL) and its Verbal Art Traditions (VATs), which eventually pushed Dr. Jones towards pursuing a PhD in Anthropology.

Her latest research documents the interactive model of open mic culture while showcasing how local artists’ performances embody and preserve “Chocolate City” — i.e., a sense of home that is being threatened by gentrification. This work earned her the prestigious Minority Dissertation Fellowship Award (2019) granted by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). However, she now hopes to explore other African American verbal art forms to reveal a continuum of linguistic creativity and resiliency. She believes the forms (e.g., Hip Hop, Spoken Word, Black Sermonizin, and more) assist communities with finding joy and healing in the midst of trauma such as those undertaken by communities in the U.S. South.