Ingrid Espinoza

PhD candidate

Ingrid Espinoza is a doctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality" under the supervision of Prof. Steffen Eckhard and Prof. Eva Thomann.

Ingrid completed her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Sociology at the University of Stuttgart, specializing in migration research and quantitative research methods for the social sciences. Afterward, she obtained her Master’s degree in Empirical Political and Social Research with a focus on Computational Social Science, also at the University of Stuttgart.


Research

In her Ph.D. Project, Ingrid explores power dynamics in public service encounters with a focus on discrimination and racial inequality using computational linguistic methods to model behavior through language.

She also works in the interdisciplinary research project „Inequality in Street-Level Bureaucracy: Linguistic Analysis of Public Service Encounters“ funded by the Cluster of Excellence „The Politics of Inequality". At the core of this project is the systematic exploration of spoken communication between public officials and citizens. The project works towards answering two interrelated research questions: First, what are the dimensions of a taxonomy of administrative language and how can we measure them? Second, what is the relationship between linguistic cues of administrative language and the (in)equal treatment of citizens and societal groups?

Areas of interest

  • Computational Sociolinguistic
  • Discrimination and Racial Inequality
  • Post-colonial approaches in research