Doris Warriner is a linguistic anthropologist of education who is interested in using ethnographic methods to examine the educational, social, political, economic, and ideological dimensions of movement and mobility—with a particular focus on the relationship between communicative practices and the lived experiences, literacy development and learning trajectories of immigrant and refugee families. In her scholarship and teaching, she draws on theories and approaches from applied linguistics, literacy studies, educational anthropology and linguistic anthropology to show how social practices are influenced by large-scale processes such as displacement, ethnic conflict, immigration and transnationalism.
Warriner is currently an associate professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. She received her doctorate in 2003 from the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. Her dissertation, entitled 'Here without English You are Dead': Language Ideologies and the Experiences of Women Refugees Enrolled in an Adult ESL Program, examined how adult women learners of English (from the Sudan, Iran, and the former Yugloslavia) were positioned by institutional and ideological discourses, their responses to the positions ascribed to them, and the social and economic consequences of those responses. This dissertation was awarded the 2005 Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Council on Anthropology and Education, American Anthropological Association.
