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. This norm has been incredibly destructive, restricting individuals' access to knowledge, health, economic opportunity, and power. In this roundtable, we hope to begin to articulate a related and practical notion of Linguistic Trust, under which interlocutors in educational, leadership, or partnership roles invite other interlocutors to participate while using a non-standard variety of a language.
Our main question will be: How could an invitation to participate by using 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, and public-facing communication) 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.
Alison Hanson is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at UCSC. Her research focuses on narrative, legal, and institutional practices around sexual violence and “survivorship.” Her dissertation project examines how sexual violence is scripted on college campuses and how survivors articulate, refuse, or rewrite those scripts. She is trained as a state-certified sexual and domestic violence peer counselor. She is committed to applied research and currently works as the Prevention Education Coordinator for the CARE office on campus.
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.
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.
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.
Sasaki is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics who works on the representation and processing of discourse, particularly in understudied languages. 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.
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.
Rysling will moderate panel discusson. She is an assistant professor in Linguistics at UCSC. Her research focuses on understanding context effects — cases where the context in which language occurs affects users' representation and comprehension of that language.