Aris Moreno Clemons is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Having completed her doctoral degree in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, her work spans the fields of linguistics, education, anthropology, and Black and Latinx studies in order to interrogate the intersections of language, race, and identity. Originally from (all over) the Bay Area in California, she has been steeped in the traditions of anti-racist pedagogies and has dedicated herself to developing and sustaining these practices in her own research and teaching. As such, her research agenda is rooted in social change through an examination of the ways that what appears to be common knowledge is often constructed and ideologically maintained by various social institutions. Overarchingly, Aris questions the linguistic mechanisms—repetitions, stance taking, tropicalizations, etc.—responsible for the (re)construction and maintenance of racializing and marginalizing ideologies.
Aris is a scholar of raciolinguistics, a branch of sociolinguistics that examines how language practices contribute to the making of ethno-racial identity. She has dedicated herself to becoming truly transdisciplinary, drawing on literature from the fields of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, education, and cultural studies. As a member of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), the American Studies Association (ASA), American Educational Research Association (AERA), and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Aris is an active participant in a wide range of scholarly communities. This participation forms part of her scholarly praxis, which calls her to engage her topic from a variety of vantage points.
Having been raised with a focus on social justice, much of Aris's academic formation was developed prior to her entry into higher education spaces. For the past eighteen years, she has dedicated her professional career to education, working as a classroom teacher, high school administrator, teacher trainer, and educational non-profit consultant in K-16 contexts in the United States and abroad. Aris bases her educational praxis in a belief that through acquired knowledge there can be restorative justice. Moreover, her experiences have centralized educational contexts as a starting point for many of her academic endeavors. She argues that linguistic research should be primary in our understandings of race and ethnicity, expanding the scope of what has traditionally constituted linguistic research as well as what has counted as cultural or ethnic studies research. Combatting anti-Blackness informs her linguistic work in the realm of educational and cultural studies. Her work applies methods derived in linguistic anthropology, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics alongside Black feminist frames of interpretation in order to question our current understandings of language, race, ethnicity, identity, and authenticity. Additionally, she draws on work in language and literacy and critical race pedagogies in Black and Latinx educational studies to inform and contextualize her work.