Chelsea Krajcik received her MA from SOAS in 2014 in Language Documentation and Description where she carried out fieldwork and sociolinguistic research in the multilingual village of Santiago, Guatemala, focusing on Mayan youth and their attitudes towards their languages Tz’utujil and Spanish. Upon completion, she continued directly onto the Crossroads project as a PhD student. Her current research focuses on analysing multimodality in the semantic domain of placement and removal events (aka, verbs of putting and taking and the manual gestures that co-occur with this speech). She looks at how information is processed by multilingual speakers in two of the many languages they speak: Joola Kujireray and French.

As gesture studies is still emerging in the field of linguistics, this research offers a unique opportunity to explore the gesture system of the speakers of the Casamance region. She has successfully completed two seasons of fieldwork, working collaboratively with members of the village of Brin to carry out this research.

Chelsea says: ‘I’m very pleased to be working on this dynamic, adventurous team and to be working in such a wonderful community in the Casamance. I’m looking forward to the outcomes of the research on individual levels, and as a team.”