Rachel Showstack, Ph.D.
Founding Director of Alce su Voz
Associate Professor of Spanish
at Wichita State University
Rachel Showstack (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Wichita State University, Co-Director of the Academic Center for Biomedical and Health Humanities and Founding Director of Alce su Voz (ASV). She received her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and her MA in Spanish from Sacramento State University in 2006.
Dr. Showstack’s current scholarship addresses language and health equity and community-based learning and research methods. Her work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited collections, and she is co-author of the books Health Disparities and the Applied Linguist and Language Ideologies and Linguistic Identity in Heritage Language Learning. In addition to her academic writing, she also regularly contributes op-ed pieces to state and local news publications and posts for the Alce su Voz blog.
At Wichita State, she has taught a range of Spanish language and linguistics and interdisciplinary honors courses and regularly teaches an introductory linguistics course for language majors. In her free time, she enjoys reading, swimming, hiking with her family, and snuggling with her cats.
Blog
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Building Equitable Health Services for Speakers of Mayan Languages: Community Voices in Southeast KS
by Rachel Showstack Did you know that your health is influenced by your zip code? Public messaging often presents good health as the result of a series of personal choices, such as eating well, attaining regular health screenings, staying up to date on vaccines, and being physically active. However, there are factors that shape our…
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Community Engagement for Vaccine Equity
Alce su Voz (‘Speak out’) has been getting to know Guatemalan indigenous individuals who live in southwest and southeast Kansas and learning about the multiple Guatemalan indigenous communities that reside in rural regions of our state. This community engagement is part of the first phase of our project “Vaccine equity for Guatemalan Indigenous Communities in…