Since 2011, she has also directed the Center for California Languages and Cultures within UC Santa Barbara's Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research.
She still serves as an editorial board member of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology[6] (from 1999 to 2001 and since 2005), Visual Communication[7] (since 2004), the International Journal on Research in Critical Discourse Analysis (since 2005), Language and Linguistics Compass[8] (since 2006), American Speech (since 2008), Research on Language and Social Interaction (since 2009), Pragmatics and Society[9] (since 2009), and Discourse, Context, and Media[10] (since 2011).
[13] As a sociocultural linguist, Bucholtz has focused on researching how language is used in interactional contexts to create identity and culture and contribute to issues of social power.
[15] Her research extended the work of Penelope Eckert, who identified three adolescent social categories (jocks, burnouts, and in-betweens) concerned with pursuing "coolness."
From 1994 to 1996, Bucholtz studied another social category, "nerds," using a California high school in the San Francisco Bay Area as her field site.