Research
Dr. Isacoff's scholarship centers around the question of how we, as humans, construct meaningful categories: how these labels do and don't serve us, letting us make sense out of senselessness, connecting us with our identities and communities, enabling us to communicate and advocate, but also leading us astray, dividing us, and forestalling progress. She has investigated these questions from the perspectives of child development, linguistic relativity, education policy, linguistics of propaganda, neurodiversity, diverse discourse, self-communication, cognitive science in fiction, and others. She employs both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Her interdisciplinary approach both treasures the scientific method as our most extraordinary epistemological system and looks to the wisdom of the humanities as a guiding light for how best to put our scientific skills to use.
