Our featured Fellow for June 2023 is Dr. Amy Takebe, a recent graduate of the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and Applied Linguistics program at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Takebe’s dissertation, titled “Japanese Disaster Warnings: Honorifics, Multimodality, Identity and Ideology,” analyzes the construction and perception of Japanese disaster warnings disseminated through social media and broadcasting media through theoretical and methodological insights from usage-based analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, and Folk Linguistics. 

As an American Third Culture Kid (TCK) born and raised in Japan, Amy has always envisioned herself using her bilingual skills in English and Japanese in her career. After receiving her M.A. in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) from Oklahoma State University in 2011, Amy began working as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lecturer at Hokkaido University of Education in Hokkaido, Japan. In April 2016, Amy’s final year at HUE, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck the cities in Kumamoto, Japan. Following the earthquake, one of Amy’s former students decided to volunteer as a multilingual interpreter for the international residents and tourists in Kumamoto. While helping the student prepare for her translation work, Amy realized that there is a wide range of important perspectives that applied linguists could offer in the discussion of developing disaster-resilient communities. With a goal to further deepen her understanding of risk communication from an applied linguistic point of view, Amy began her doctoral studies at Oklahoma State University in Fall 2017. 

Amy joined the BAF family as a Fellow in Fall 2019. She is thankful for the numerous professional development and interdisciplinary networking opportunities that BAF provided over the years. One of her favorite memories from her time as a BAF Fellow was in 2021 when she served as the Lightning Talks Coordinator and worked with other Lightning Talks committee members and presenters to organize the Bill Anderson Fund Lightning Talks session at the 46th Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop.

Amy received multiple awards and recognitions during her graduate studies at Oklahoma State University, including the Carol Guagliardo Preston Award. This is an award given to OSU students “whose research, teaching, service and planned career best reflect an emphasis on the importance of linguistic and applied linguistic work in addressing social justice and human and civil rights, particularly in situations of ethno-linguistic diversity.” In April 2023, Amy joined the Design Network for Emergency Management, a multidisciplinary and international organization dedicated to bringing forth the impact of information design for emergency management and disaster reduction.

In Fall 2023, Amy will be joining the faculty of the Center for Language Studies at Otaru University of Commerce in Hokkaido, Japan as an associate professor in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. Amy is excited to continue researching disaster warning broadcast designs, language ideologies in disaster contexts as well as developing a language learning curriculum for multilingual disaster volunteers.

You can watch Amy’s 2021 Lightning Talk on language use in a Japanese tsunami warning broadcast here.

For the list of her recent academic works, please click here.