STAL organizes a monthly seminar on issues related to the study of slurs, pejoratives, and evaluative and expressive terms in general, from less studied languages.
The titles and abstracts of the talks in the 2024-2025 academic year can be seen here.
The titles and abstracts of the talks in the 2023-2024 academic year can be seen here.
In the 2025-2026 academic year, the STAL seminar takes place on
MONDAYS, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time.
The next seminar is
APRIL 20, 2026
Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California)
"What Is Wrong with Slurs?"
ABSTRACT:
Many forms of verbal discourse are dangerous and cause harm, yet slurs are repeatedly distinguished for special moral censure, so much so that in many liberal democracies, their use is not legally protected. What is wrong with using them? In this paper, I aim to illuminate why slurs are rightly singled out for special, deeper social censure. Such acts do typically perform wrongs and cause numerous harms: they negatively stereotypes, reductively de-individualize, create and perpetuate social hierarchies and social exclusion, and undermine the target group’s reputation, as many researchers have shown. Nevertheless, I believe none of these captures the distinctive moral wrong in slurring speech acts. To illuminate their moral dimension, I take inspiration from moral-psychological work on degradation, humiliation, and dehumanization, as well as work on the distinctive wrong in interrogational torture. Sussman, Luban, and Kramer have argued that what is distinctively wrong with interrogational torture is not the extreme pain itself – though of course it is wrong for that. What makes torture distinctively wrong is it being used as a tool to humiliate by forcing the victim via their affective experience to, effectively, collude with the torturer, and do so against their will. To torture, the torturer ensures that the victim experiences their own agency as undermined, as ‘owned’ by the torturer. Building on these ideas, I argue that a prime source of the perniciousness in weapon uses of slurs that distinguishes them from other harmful types of speech parallels a deep wrong inherent to torture: the perversion and undermining of the slur’s target’s agency by forcing them to perceive and experience themselves as lesser humans. Weapon uses of slurs in the conditions of most vulnerability are best seen as micro-linguistic acts of torture. I close this paper by addressing the moral dimension of slur-mentions. I argue that there is a foundational moral wrong in slur-mentions, one that is parasitic on the moral wrong in using slurs. Slurs, the words themselves, function as representations of the perversion and undermining of their target group’s agency, akin to the way photographic representations of torture (and lynching and rape) function. In non-legal or non-education contexts, they can be abused, with the representations serving as additional symbolic humiliations and affronts to the human dignity of the target groups.
The schedule for the 2025-2026 academic year is the following:
OCTOBER 27, 2025
Luvell Anderson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
"Theories of Reclamation"
NOVEMBER 17, 2025
Claire Horisk (University of Missouri)
"Derogatory Speech: Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners"
DECEMBER 15, 2025
Xavier Villalba (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
"Expressivity Cross-linguistically: A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic"
JANUARY 19, 2026
Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University)
"Aesthetic Slurs"
FEBRUARY 9, 2026
Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)
"Why Do Mantras Move Us?"
MARCH 9, 2026
Leopold Hess (Jagiellonian University)
"Recognizing Slurs: The Case of Polish Murzyn"
APRIL 20, 2026
Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California)
"What Is Wrong with Slurs?"
MAY 18, 2026
Yim Binh Felix Sze (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
TBA
JUNE 1, 2026
Mingya Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin)
TBA