Adrienne Lynett
As a doctoral student in the Applied Linguistics program at UCLA, my training has been in anthropological approaches to various language practices, including language acquisition, media and political discourses, literacy learning, and therapeutic interactions. In particular, I am interested in how interaction and social cognition shapes an individual’s socialization into a community — whether a language community, workplace, classroom, or other social group. With regard to mental health, I am interested in exploring the interactions between mental conditions (such as stress or anxiety) and this kind of socialization. To this end, I have been working with a group of Spanish-speaking adult literacy students in Los Angeles, paying special attention to the role of acculturative stress and other challenges in their acquisition of literacy skills. In Puebla, I had the opportunity to add a cross-cultural component to my investigation into literacy acquisition. Apart from my own project, in Puebla I also contributed to Dr. López’s family socialization project — an unparalleled opportunity for me to learn more about the field of mental health, and more generally about the reciprocal interactions between the individual and his/her social world.