Beauty Umana

Part-Time Researcher, Social Science & Health Innovations for Tuberculosis

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Beauty is a sociolinguist who has conducted research on language, migration, and social change. Her work focuses on Nigerian immigrants in Cape Town, drawing on their everyday lived experiences as immigrants to examine their social positioning as insiders and outsiders in their new society and how this positioning influences language use.

Beauty’s primary research interest is how stigma can interfere with disease treatment. Her broader research interests include language policy, women’s health, TB stigma, and other disease-related stigma.

She holds an adjunct lecturing position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where she lectures at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Previously, she also worked as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Dental Sciences at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa, where she taught advanced academic competencies at the undergraduate level.

Beauty’s current project focusses on TB stigma in South Africa. This project will illuminate how language commonly associated with TB prevention and treatment may be a vehicle for its implicit stigmatization. The study employs critical discourse analysis methodology to examine policy documents and clinical guidelines for TB testing and management. Informed by an interpretive paradigm, the primary aim of the study is to reveal how language is utilized to manufacture social and normative experiences, feelings, and public health responses to TB.

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