Robin Conley Riner Email and Phone Number

Robin specializes in the fields of legal and linguistic anthropology. She has conducted ethnographic research on death penalty trials across Texas, investigating how the use of language shapes jurors’ experiences during trials and impacts their life and death decisions. Her book, Confronting the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2016), specifically explores how jurors use language to counter moments of empathy they share with defendants, thereby justifying their decisions for death. Her explorations into the connections among language, empathy, and violence in law engage with ongoing debates in law and society and language and culture, especially regarding American ideologies of democracy and lay judging. Her previous research focused on the construction of gendered identity within legal and medical settings.Robin has taught extensively in cultural and linguistic anthropology, ethnographic methods and theory, gender and language, and language and the law. She is currently collaborating with some Marshall University colleagues to conduct an interdisciplinary study of higher education in Appalachia. The project aims to investigate the socio-cultural and economic influences on the region’s relatively poor achievement in higher education.