Spectrum Center and the Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs Office (MESA) are proud to continue an initiative centering Queer and Transgender People of Color (QTPOC): Community Dinners for/by QTPOC. FREE DINNER will be provided to the first 15 students who sign up for the respective dinners. If there are more than 15 students signing up for a dinner session, they will be put on a waiting list. The host for this dinner is Dominique Canning.
Dominique is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics (with a focus on sociolinguistics and phonetics) and in her 4th year at the University of Michigan. She graduated in 2016 from Eastern Michigan University (EMU) where she was part of the McNair Scholars Program.
Dominique’s research is partially motivated by her own identity as a queer woman of color. She identifies as aromantic asexual and is frequently conscious of how she uses language to navigate through both academic and non-academic spaces. At EMU, she researched the discussion around asexual inclusion in queer spaces online. Though she is not currently looking at asexuality specifically, she looks at queerness and language in her current research. Most recently, she examined the way language was used to construct Titus Andromedon's identity as a Black gay man in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In her future research, she plans to look at how queer people of color use language to construct their own identities in various spaces.
