Aris Clemons is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as a graduate portfolio student in the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research stands at the nexus of linguistic studies, education, and ethnic studies as it explores the relationship between language, racial categorizations, and identity for Afro-Latinx immigrants and their children in educational contexts. After completing her BA in Spanish and Political Science, she resided in Madrid, Spain for several years where she worked as a middle school teacher in a bilingual school. She earned her MA in linguistic theory from Syracuse University in 2012 and continued her career as a high school Spanish teacher and administrator in Brooklyn, NY until the start of her doctoral studies at UT Austin in 2016. Additionally, she has served as a development coordinator, a program director and a curriculum developer for several non-profits in Madrid, Spain, California and New York. Both her educational experiences and her professional experiences have engendered a deep desire to create socially responsive scholarship. As a doctoral student she has had the opportunity to work as a Teaching Assistant for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, a mentor for the Intellectual Entrepreneurship undergraduate mentor, an assistant instructor for Spanish language courses and recently an assistant instructor for a self-designed course entitled Racial Linguistics.
