Immigrant Culture

Yan R. Xia is an associate professor in Child, Youth and Family Studies. Among other topics, she teaches addiction and violence in the family. Before joining the UNL faculty, she served as a research analyst at the Girls and Boys Town National Research Institute for Child and Family Studies. Xia’s recent research has been focused in three areas: resiliency in immigrant families; adolescent behavioral health, particularly among Asian adolescents; and Chinese marriage and family. One of her research projects examines risk and prevention of substance abuse among Vietnamese youth. Updated 9/14/23

A professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education, Theresa Catalano studies education for language teachers and the interaction between global migration, language and education. Her 2016 book, “Talking about Global Migration: Implications for Language Teaching,” focused on the stories of migrants around the world and the metaphors they use when they talk about their experiences. She is co-author of a 2020 volume (with Linda Waugh) that lays out key concepts behind critical discourse studies, a problem-oriented research discipline that critically examines the relationship between language and visual communication, ideology, power and social inequality. Catalano is an active member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s M3 Initiative, housed in the Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education Department, and dedicated to scholarship on (im)migrant, multilingual and multicultural education. She teaches classes about language pedagogy, intercultural communication, and multilingual learners. She is an expert in second/additional language acquisition and teaching, as well as critical discourse analysis, linguistics and world/dual language education. (Updated May 2025.)