Researcher, AddressHateDan Headrick

Dan Headrick is a linguist whose work spans second language acquisition, discourse analysis, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). He holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from Teachers College, Columbia University (2017), where he used critical discourse analysis to examine political rhetoric, including how politicians use closed-class words to construct and position a transgressive "other." His research explores the linguistic features of populist discourse and their relationship to hate speech. He has also worked in NLU, focusing on intent classification and the challenges that elliptical, context-dependent communication presents for automated language understanding.

At AddressHate, he works on the discourse-analytic foundations of hate speech classification, contributing to the development of annotation categories by analyzing the contextual and pragmatic dimensions of language, as well as the implicit social and structural assumptions that underpin coded and indirect forms of hateful communication.