As a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist who conducts ethnographic studies of social work and allied professions, Professor Carr seeks to highlight what is fundamentally cultural about professional practices and organizations. More specifically, her work to date examines how culturally rooted ideas about language and personhood shape clinical interventions and social welfare administration, which in turn, refine these ideas by processing people and problems in accordance with them. She sustains broader interests in the cultural history of American psychotherapies, the politics of communication, the ethnography of complex institutions, and the anthropology of the United States. Salikoko Mufwene