bfhuma01@yorku.ca
Beauty is an interdisciplinary scholar in sociolinguistics and health policy and equity passionate about mobility and social justice. Her sociolinguistic work has allowed her conduct 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. Beauty’s primary research interest in health discipline is how stigma can interfere with disease treatment specifically in black communities in low income countries. 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, teaching advanced academic competencies at the undergraduate level.
Beauty’s current project focuses on TB stigma in in black communities of 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.