“Articulating Trust: A cross-disciplinary roundtable conversation about language rights and socio-linguistic justice in higher education and beyond” will be followed by a Q&A and discussion with the audience.

In this conversation, we are hoping to further develop the notion of Language Rights, recently applied to the context of higher education. The right to one’s own linguistic variety marks an overdue departure from the deeply entrenched norm that would restrict the language of knowledge and thought to a so-called “standard” language. In this roundtable we hope to begin to articulate a related and practical notion of Linguistic Trust, where interlocutors in research and educational roles invite other interlocutors to participate while using a non-standard variety. Our main question will be: How could an invitation to participate in a “non-standard” variety be articulated? What are some of the strategies or cues which could be leveraged to invite our interlocutors to use non-standard varieties, especially in settings (such as classroom teaching, mentoring, researching) in which hegemonic norms would dictate the exclusive use of a standard variety? By bringing together scholars from different disciplines we hope to open up a conversation about what it means to build trust in sociolinguistic diversity and how hegemonic linguistic norms can be subverted – one interaction at a time.

For more information and to receive the Zoom link to discussion, please see: https://sites.google.com/ucsc.edu/articulatingtrust/home

Hosted by Linguistics, Anthropology, and co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

Roundtable Participants:

Kara Hisatake received her PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and writes about settler colonialism, language politics, decolonization, race, and gender in Hawai’i and the broader Pacific. Her work appears in Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space, and Race (2018), edited by Yu-ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, and in Amerasia. She currently teaches high school in Honolulu.

Kelsey Sasaki is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics. Since 2016, she has worked with speakers of Santiago Laxopa Zapotec on a variety of projects, from psycholinguistic studies to public language-learning classes. This year, she is a THI Public Fellow of Senderos, a local nonprofit that serves the Latino/a/x community.

Dr. Bahiyyah Maroon is a nationally recognized thought leader on equity and social change. She’s appeared in Women’s Health, Self, Bustle, and Health Daily. Out magazine named her a top ten innovator in the nation for her contributions to social change by dignified design. Dr. Maroon is the CEO of Polis, an applied research institute. She is also a proud recipient of the U.S. President’s Volunteer Service Award for her contributions to equity in STEM education. She received her doctorate in anthropology from UCSC. Dr. Maroon has provided strategic insights to Intel Corporation, Harvard University, the US Dept. of Justice, and the US Dept. of Labor among others. Dr. Maroon is passionate about deploying social science to create solutions that result in a more compassionate and equitable world.

Megan Moodie is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in feminist theory and disability politics. Her current project looks at the ways that women living with chronic pain negotiate work, family, and medical spaces and engage in forms of self advocacy and political organizing in which complex chronic illness becomes a site of identification or “biosociality.” As an essayist, fiction writer, dramatist/screenwriter, and film critic who often engages with audiences outside academia, she frequently works at the arts/social sciences interface; building on a long tradition in anthropology in which creative practices inform social science research, she is the founder of the Center for Artful Ethnography here at UC Santa Cruz, which will be a hub for innovative teaching and research.

Ivy Sichel is a syntactician with a growing interest in Language and Society in the US and in Israel. Her recent work focuses on ideology, identity, and the state, in the emergence and consolidation of modern vernacular Hebrew in the 20th century, in Israel/Palestine. She is trying to understand what it means for a language to be gendered or racialized, through the prism of emergent Modern Hebrew, which, although perhaps unique in terms of the historical conditions that led to its emergence, is arguably exemplary of the ways in which our languages are always sedimented, politically and ideologically.