My research addresses five thematic areas and the intersections between them: childhood and socialization, language and communication, ethics and morality, health and well-being, and environments and environmental change. Much of my research is based on my long-term linguistic and ethnographic field work with the Indigenous Aché communities in eastern Paraguay.

Environmental Change and Moral Development

I am currently Principal Investigator of the project Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods: A Cross-Environmental Ethnography of Moral Socialization in Three Small-Scale Societies for which I received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. It is a five-year research project (2025–29) based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society investigating the impact of environmental changes on the moral development of children in three Indigenous societies in Paraguay, Malaysia, and Namibia.

Indigenous communities across the world have been experiencing rapid changes to the spaces they inhabit, such as deforestation or changing land use, forcing them to radically alter their ways of life and subsistence. But we know very little about how these may impact children’s upbringing, particularly their moral development and well-being. While the role of environments for the development of morality is widely recognized—on ontogenetic, historical, or evolutionary timescales—they are mostly taken for granted as providing stable contexts for human action. To date there is no study of the concrete ways of how the affordances of different environments and their transformations impact the socialization of children.

To address this gap, this project undertakes longitudinal, family-based ethnographic studies in three Indigenous former hunter-gatherer communities in Paraguay, Malaysia, and Namibia. Each of these communities has experienced dramatic environmental changes and settled in villages or towns, but still goes on extended foraging treks in nearby nature reserves. Comparing these environments will allow the researchers to examine differences between past and present modes of existence and understand how environmental change impacts sociality and morality. Through video-based analysis, ethnography, interviews, and psychological experiments, my team and I will analyze children’s everyday interactions with caregivers and peers across different environments and their reflexive understandings of attendant moral values.

An interview about my project and academic trajectory was recently published in Springs.

Childhood and the Environment

My ERC-funded project is part of a broader effort to advance scholarship on children and the environment, which I am spearheading with my colleague Francesca Mezzenzana, Principal Investigator of the project Learning Natures, also based at the Rachel Carson Center. While it is widely recognized that the environment plays a crucial role in child development, at the same time as our understandings of the environment are formed in childhood, the childhood-environment nexus remains underexplored. In our work we explore questions such as how children learn about the environment and its inhabitants, the relationships they form with these, the skills that they develop to navigate different environments, how environmental changes impact children’s development and well-being, as well as how children adapt to new environments. We have recently edited a Special Issue on these questions, published in the journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.

Linguistic and Ethnographic Research with the Aché

I have been conducting research with the Aché since 2007. The Aché are a former nomadic hunter-gatherer society that was forced to settle on reservations in the 1960 and 70s because of deforestation, persecutions, and epidemics. Sedentarization led to dramatic changes, including language shift from their heritage language, Aché, to the Paraguayan national language Guaraní. Together with my colleagues Eva-Maria Rößler and Warren Thompson, I received two major grants from the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany: (1) a DOBES Documentation of Endangered Languages grant to document their heritage language; and (2) a DOBES research grant to study historical and contemporary transformations in language and culture. Language documentation primarily entailed recording songs, mythology, and narratives of elders. Within the second project, I carried out an in-depth, longitudinal language socialization study with the children of two Aché families to understand the mechanisms of language shift and the linguistic ecology in which children are growing up. This research led to my dissertation, entitled “Making Language: The Ideological and Interactional Constitution of Language in an Indigenous Aché Community in Eastern Paraguay,” in which I explore different aspects of language emergence.

Language Emergence

My research on language is concerned with different facets of language emergence. I understand “emergence” in a broad way, encompassing historical processes of emergence as well as emergence in the sequential unfolding of talk in interaction. In my research among the Aché, I look specifically at four interrelated processes:

• Emergence of the new indigenous mixed language, Guaraché, which children learn as their native language. Guaraché is composed of two indigenous languages that are themselves related, Aché and Guaraní.
• Emergence of language as a discursive object. Through the contact of language ideologies after settlement, language endangerment, and language revitalization and activism, “language” has become an important sociocultural object among the Aché, an index of ethnic identity.
• Children’s development of metalinguistic awareness of linguistic difference. Through schooling, activism, and contact with outsiders, children learn to differentiate in their repertoire of forms between those belonging to one language and those belonging to another.
• Emergence of language as experiential or phenomenological object. By looking at what may be understood as codeswitching or language mixing through a conversation analytic lens, I explore how language is made salient and perceptually highlighted in everyday interaction, for example through repairs and substitutions.

Ontologies of Language and Linguistic Natures

My work with the Aché has also led me to explore broader questions of the ontological grounds of what language is from indigenous epistemological perspectives. As part of efforts at intellectual decolonization, and in dialogue with critical linguistic theory building from the Global South (e.g., Pennycook and Makoni 2019), together with my colleague Guilherme Heurich I have advanced the concept of “linguistic natures” as a challenge to Euro-American-derived understandings of language that still prevail in much research and theory. We have organized three conference panels and two workshops, exploring the philosophical and cosmological foundations of a variety of linguistic phenomena in different indigenous communities across the Americas. We have coedited a special issue in Language & Communciation (Hauck and Heurich 2018). I also gave an invited keynote on this topic at the “Critical Language Research: Applied Linguistic and Anthropological Approaches” workshop at Newcastle University (watch here), an extended version of which was published recently in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

Bilingualism and Cultural Integration

In 2005 I participated in a project investigating cultural integration along the border regions of the (then) four Mercosur countries, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. I co-edited the two ensuing volumes, one in German (Chiappini and Hauck 2007) and one bilingual in Spanish and Portuguese (Hauck, Chiappini, and Timm 2011). My own research within that project was concerned with the role of the indigenous language Guaraní for Paraguayan and regional identity politics. A resulting monograph Language Under Construction (Hauck 2009) looks at linguistic purism and hybridity in (Guaraní-Spanish) bilingual language planning while also analyzing the philosophical foundations that underlie conflicting policy proposals.

Narrative and the Construction of Self

As a contribution to ongoing efforts to bridge linguistic and psychological anthropology, I have also dedicated research to the role of narrative in the construction and transformation of self. For example, I have analyzed narratives of Aché elders about their experience of the encounter with white society, their suffering and the violence endured, and the radical changes that followed settlement on reservations. A paper discussing a narrative about these transformations and their ethical and ontological foundations is forthcoming in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

I have also published a chapter co-authored with Teruko Mitsuhara in which we analyze the narrative structure of US president Trump’s (non-)apology to the misogynist “Access Hollywood” tape. The paper demonstrates how he circumvents the display of an (apologetic) past self and manages to appear authentic and coherent.

The Making of Forest

At the Rachel Carson Center, I also explore how the objectification of language as cultural resource relates to the objectification of the environment (“nature”), specifically the forest. As former full-time hunter-gatherers, for the Aché the forest was the taken-for-granted environment in which all life was embedded. Yet after settlement and drastic deforestation, only few stretches of forest remain on the Aché reservations. But these have become increasingly important resources, economically and symbolically. Just as language, “forest” has thus become present to reflexive awareness at the very moment that it is on the verge of disappearance.

Human–Nonhuman Interaction

Combining my background in language socialization and micro-interactional studies of communication with my expertise in human–environment relations and indigenous ontologies, I explore modes of human interactions with nonhumans (such as animals, plants, forests, landscapes, or nature). Close attention to the everyday practices of attending to and communicating with nonhumans (including language, gestures, as well as touch) can shed light on larger questions of nonhuman personhood and humans’ understandings and perceptions of “nature.” As in my other research, I am particularly interested in the perspective of children. Research on how children are socialized into attending to nonhumans can give us crucial insights into how particular understandings of these emerge and the how ethical relations with these are developed. This research is particular timely in the current times marked by anthropogenic environmental disaster in which we have to develop new ways of relating to the nonhuman world.

Health Services Research

I have also conducted Health Services Research at the Center for the Study of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation and Policy (CSHIIP) of the Veterans Health Administration in Los Angeles. In the context of the VA’s ongoing Electronic Health Record transition, I have analyzed training inadequacies during preparations for the transitions and led a study exploring the experience of nurses who participated in a novel scenario-based simulation training. I have also conducted research on the implementation of evidence-based practices to improve women’s health, as well as on toxic substance exposure.