Area of Interest: Race and Language
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February 2024: Considering Language about “the Conflict”
As the world remains transfixed by daily news reports about the ongoing conflict involving Israel and Palestine, playing out largely in Gaza, some observers have directed attention to how events are being verbally described in the English-language press. It would appear that a war of actions is being bolstered by a war of words.
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April 2023: “Multilingual Life on a Monolingual Campus: Findings and Recommendations”
This month’s Spotlight focuses on a project of the Language, Culture and Justice Hub, “Multilingual Life on a Monolingual Campus,” whose final report is now available. Six Brandeis University student researchers collaborated with Hub director Leigh Swigart, seeking to shed light on how international students live their linguistic lives on our campus. A central question for the study…
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March 2023: ‘#GLAD23 offers diverse perspectives on the importance of language rights’
This month’s Spotlight provides a brief overview of the recently concluded Global Language Advocacy Day 2023 (#GLAD23), organized by the Global Coalition for Language Rights. This year’s GLAD theme was Language Rights Save Lives. The Coalition works at the intersection of language, digital and human rights. Its aims are: · To support global efforts towards increasing access to critical…
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November 2022: “Decolonizing Accent in English-Language Teaching”
This month’s Spotlight comes from Language, Culture and Hub member Mingyi Li. Mingyi is a Ph.D. student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. For her Master’s degree, she explored how Western influence has affected Chinese doctoral students’ understanding of the West before they came to Canada, as…
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March 2022: “Linguistic profiling: An under-recognized force in the justice system and beyond”
LCJ Hub member Shawna Shapiro, Associate Professor of writing and linguistics at Middlebury College in the US, calls our attention to an often unperceived influence on our interactions and understandings, including those in the legal field. Read more about Shawna’s work at her college webpage. One of the commonplaces in the legal profession and the criminal…
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December 2021: “Securing the Borders of English and Whiteness”
Brass ‘White Australia’ protection badge, 1906. Image credit: National Museum of Australia This month’s Spotlight features a recently published commentary from Language on the Move (LOTM), a peer-reviewed sociolinguistics research site devoted to multilingualism, language learning, and intercultural communication in the contexts of globalization and migration. It was prepared by Ingrid Piller, LOTM editor and Distinguished Professor…
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March 2020: “Searching for Language to Describe Discrimination on the Basis of Work and Descent”
This commentary was contributed by Hub member Rajesh Sampath, associate professor of the philosophy of justice, rights and social change at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis. I am a part of an international group of NGO leaders, activists, scholars, artists and former heads of minority rights divisions of major multilateral institutions.…
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December 2019: ‘Race, Language and Belonging: How Just is our Listening?’
A recent talk by University of Toronto scholar Vijay Ramjattan delves into the field of raciolinguistics, which examines how language is used to construct race and how ideas of race influence language and language use, especially in relation to racialized subjects. Scholars Nelson Flores (University of Pennsylvania) and Jonathan Rosa (Stanford University) coined the term “raciolinguistic ideologies”…
