As a linguistic anthropologist, Dr. Heather Loyd is interested in how human experience is socially constructed through talk and interaction. She views speakers as social actors and language as a powerful tool to get things done in everyday lives, such as display personal and group identities, maintain relationships, as well as create inequalities through stereotyping and discrimination. Dr. Loyd has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the U.S. and Italy for ten years. Her research is rooted in a critical dialogue between linguistic anthropology and sociocultural studies of youth, class, and gender. She examines the ways in which children grow up in various urban environments across social classes. Research conducted in urban spaces tends to focus on males. Dr. Loyd’s dissertation research instead turns to the public and private worlds of girls, examining the ways in which they navigate everyday problems and social systems through talk and interaction. Her dissertation, Growing up Fast: The Rhetoric of Resilience among Inner City Neapolitan Girls, examines the ways in which girls, faced with harsh economic conditions and social marginalization from mainstream society, learn and use particular communicative strategies from a very young age, such as assertiveness, wit, and sarcasm, to cope with risk and inequality in their inner city environment. These rhetorical strategies are used as a means for carving out dignity and personal empowerment in their daily experiences of multi-dimensional exclusion.