As departments seek to push back against the historical exclusion of minoritized languages/varieties, scholars, and approaches, it is crucial that this work be distributed across disciplines: This can't be seen as a problem for only some of our colleagues/courses to address. In this talk, I provide some historical motivation for this synchronic pattern in linguistics. I then present examples of how to highlight racial/social justice issues in courses which do not traditionally include those topics, drawing on my experience as a racialized bilingual and bicultural student and scholar in (experimental) syntax, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition/evolution. I focus on four guiding principles:
(1) Designing courses around debunking common harmful misconceptions which emerging linguists and language learners bring to the classroom
(2) Centering traditionally peripheralized topics
(3) Marking the unmarked by discussing how the exclusion of particular languages and communities have shaped and been shaped by our theoretical and methodological approaches
(4) Broadening the scope of readings and texts
Just as our courses are potentially loci of wall-building, delineating for students what is and is not under the purview of linguistics, they can also be a space for boundary-breaking, encouraging our students and ourselves to reimagine what our fields are and can be.
Savithry Namboodiripad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan.
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