Research Areas and Publications

Janet McIntosh’s research, conducted primarily in Kenya and the United States, has spanned the domains of linguistics (language, meaning and society); militarism, violence, and right-wing studies; ethnic and racial relations (with a focus on colonial and post-colonial contexts); and religion and ritual.

She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language series for Oxford University Press, on the Editorial Advisory Board of Anthropology News, and on the Editorial Board of Anthropology & Humanism. Past Editorial Boards have included Cultural Anthropology; HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory; Journal of Religion in Africa, and Brill’s African Social Studies book series. She has served as a reviewer for grants and fellowships at the NSF, the NEH, the SSRC, and the ACLS; as a jury member for book prizes (including those of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Religion); and as an external reviewer for promotions at over twenty-five universities, while reviewing manuscripts for over forty university presses and journals.

PDFs of most of the work listed below can be found at the following websites:

Academia.edu
Research Gate

Language, Meaning, & Society

Janet McIntosh is widely recognized for her work in linguistic anthropology. Through long-term ethnography, interviews, and the analysis of texts and media materials, her work has extensively explored the way that language and non-linguistic signs shape the realities of and the emotions surrounding religious experience, ethnicity and race, colonialism, political conservatism, militarism, and other forms of violence. Her theoretical topics have included the study of language and thought, language ideology, stance, code-switching, participation roles, essentialism, and beyond. Additionally, she often generates her own concepts that emerge from what “the data” (the phenomena in the world) seem to be asking for.

Professor McIntosh has published two major volumes in linguistic anthropology. The first, co-edited with Norma Mendoza-Denton, is Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies (2020), to which she contributed four chapters, including the introduction. The second is the solo-authored Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics (2025).

Beyond these books, McIntosh’s writings in linguistic and semiotic anthropology include the articles and chapters listed below. Some examples of her topics: McIntosh’s 2010 article “Mobile Phones and Mipoho’s Prophecy,” the first linguistic analysis of text-messaging in Africa, has been influential in the study of identity and emerging technologies. Her article “Listening versus Lingwashing” (2018) explores white South Africans’ shifting attitudes toward southern African click languages, ranging from the colonial insistence that they were “animalistic” to the contemporary liberal trend of fetishizing clicks as “beautiful” and even “sexy.” And in “The Sinister Signs of QAnon” (2022), McIntosh examines how some Americans on the alt-right felt empowered by the semiotic code-cracking encouraged by “Q”’s social media posts.

McIntosh’s further writings on linguistics and semiotics include the following:

LINKS TO THE OPEN SOURCE ARTICLES HERE

Colorful abstract text design with the words "Society Signs and Society" in different colors and fonts.
Cover of the book titled 'Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives,' edited by Alexandra Jaffe, featuring a red and black abstract geometric pattern.
Colorful geometric cover of Linguitic Anthropology Journal, Volume 36, Number 2, August 2026, featuring an abstract face made of various colored triangles.
Cover of a book titled 'The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology,' edited by James Stanlaw, covering volumes I to IV, published by Wiley Blackwell.
The cover of a scholarly journal titled 'Language in Society', published by Cambridge University Press, featuring the volume and issue information for November 2025.
Cover of The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion, featuring colorful geometric circles and blocks.

Militarism, Violence, and Right-Wing Studies

Professor McIntosh has long been interested in the way human beings can be conditioned to take seemingly inhumane actions. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on United States military veterans to understand how feeling, thinking, and action can be bent away from empathy and towards aggression. She has also written about the emotional logic of those who support far-right causes.

In 2025, Professor McIntosh published the book Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics, which has been widely assigned in linguistic, psychological, and political anthropology classes. Her co-edited volume Language in the Trump Era (2020) includes chapters about how Trump and some of his followers have embraced a harsh in-group/out-group mentality that encourages violence and hostility. Her theory of “semiotic callousing” is a particularly well-cited new concept from the book. McIntosh was also honored to write the Introduction to Vietnam veteran Marc Levy’s book Medic in the Green Time: Writings from the Vietnam War and its Aftermath (2020).

In other articles and chapters, McIntosh’s topics have included the following. In “The Uncanny Magic of Bomb Mail” (2026), she explores what she calls the “cosmopolitan militarism” involved in contemporary inscriptions on bombs and shells, a dynamic that magically merges writing, violence, and the personhood of those who pay for such inscriptions over social media. In “When Cruelty Seems Like a Joke” (2026), McIntosh extends her theory of cruel humor in the military (which she calls “frame perversion”) to the dehumanizing jokes made by ICE and the governmental figures who support ICE’s aggressive and sometimes deadly treatment of immigrants. In “From Pajama Boy to Pepe the Frog” (2025), she explores variations on the theme of right-wing masculinity, from the hyper-physical and aggressive to the physically decrepit but ironic and nihilistic.

McIntosh's writings about militarism, violence, and right-wing studies also include the articles and chapters below. (Some of her work on whiteness in the next section on Ethnic and Racial Relations also speaks to social conservatism.)

LINKS TO THE OPEN SOURCE ARTICLES HERE

Cover of Anthropology Today, featuring a protester wearing a black shirt and red cap holding a sign at a rally or demonstration.
Book cover titled "The Best of Medic in the Green Time: Writings from the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath" by Marc Levy with an introduction by Janet McIntosh. The cover features a photograph of a military medic talking to a group of soldiers outdoors
Cover page of the Journal of Right-Wing Studies, Volume 3, Issue 2, December 2025, featuring large green letters 'J', 'R', and 'W', with smaller black text including title and publisher information.
Ten blue rhinoceroses arranged in two columns on a red background.
Book cover titled "Anthropologists in the Public Sphere" edited by Roberto J. González, with subtitle "Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power," featuring a red, white, and blue design resembling the American flag.
Billboard for Brandon's store with a slogan, holiday stockings with Donald Trump and Joe Biden images, a blue T-shirt with text about solving a puzzle and a political phrase, and a hanging bag with 'Let's go Brandon' text, against a blue sky backgrou

Ethnic and Racial Relations, Colonialism and Post-coloniality

Janet McIntosh’s first major ethnography was The Edge of Islam (2009), which examines religious and ethnic hierarchies between Swahili and Giriama on the coast of Kenya. While conducting fieldwork for that project, she found that former colonial settlers who remained in the area were both curious about her findings and attempting to understand their own place within a changing nation. Her focus on this group and their descendants eventually led to her book Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans(2016).

Examples of McIntosh’s articles on race and ethnicity include the following. In “Whiteness and Language” (2020), McIntosh offers three analytically generative definitions of whiteness before examining how they play out globally in linguistic practice and language ideology. In “Land, Belonging, and Structural Oblivion among Contemporary White Kenyans” (2017), McIntosh develops the concept of “structural oblivion” — the blind spots, dismissals, and ideological assumptions that help sustain privileged social groups. In “Autochthony and Family” (2015), McIntosh examines how white Kenyans have struggled to establish their belonging in post-colonial Kenya by asserting both their generational depth in the country and their kin-like relationships with domestic staff who may not share this sense of connection. In “Going Bush” (2006), McIntosh explores the experiences of coastal white Kenyans with the African occult, highlighting the contradictions in their identity as they fear these spiritual powers—and sometimes even draw on their potency for personal reasons—while simultaneously denying their own belief in them.

Further articles and chapters that speak to matters of race, ethnic identity, and relationships between racial/ethnic groups include:

LINKS TO THE OPEN SOURCE ARTICLES HERE

Title cover of 'The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity,' edited by Jemima Pierre and Jean Muteba Rahier, featuring illustrations of diverse people in traditional and contemporary clothing.
Cover of Africa journal showing title and border design
Cover of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, volume 32, issue 2, June 2026, with a yellow background and black geometric shapes.
Book cover titled 'Images of Africa: Storytrops and Realities,' edited by Daniel M. Mengara, featuring a close-up of an African woman smiling and wearing traditional jewelry.
Book cover with a photograph of a gray building and cloudy sky, titled 'World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean.'

Religion, Ritual, and Magic

Themes of religion and ritual, belief and practice, have been central to Professor McIntosh’s work since the publication of her first book, The Edge of Islam (2009), which explores differing models of personhood and how they shape the ways various groups understand and practice Islam. Her second book, Unsettled (2016), along with several articles, includes extensive discussion of white Kenyans’ complex relationship to the African occult, and some of her further work examines broader strains of oracular, magical, and ritualistic thought and practice in the West. Articles that develop themes in religion include the following. In “Polyontologism: When Syncretism Doesn’t Suffice” (2019), McIntosh develops her concept of polyontology, moving beyond theories of religious syncretism that assume plural beliefs and practices ultimately merge into a harmonious whole. Her article “Reluctant Muslims” (2004)—one of three pieces on spirit possession translated into Italian here —examines a dynamic of possession by Muslim spirits that is more discomfiting than empowering for the spirits’ Giriama hosts. Her personal essay “Maxwell’s Demons” (2004), anthologized in several cultural anthropology textbooks, recounts her journey with her Giriama research assistant Maxwell as their understandings of spirits diverged, intersected, and crossed back over again.

McIntosh’s further writings on religion, ritual, and magic include the following:

LINKS TO THE OPEN SOURCE ARTICLES HERE

Cover of a scientific journal titled 'Anthropology and Humanism,' December 2026 issue, with a colorful abstract background, a decorative logo, and publisher information.
The cover of the Journal of Africana Religions, published by Pennsylvania State University Press, featuring a brown background with African-inspired patterns and the title in white and light green text.
Cover of a book titled 'Journal of Religion in Africa' with an orange background and white text.
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Cover of a book titled 'Indigenous Religions,' edited by Stephen Hunt, with a blue background and white text
Cover of a book titled "The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language," with an abstract, watercolor-style background featuring soft pastel colors and flowing lines.