Sarah Allen
Pronouns: She/They
Research Mentor(s): Kelly Wright
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Department of Linguistics / LSA
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Session 5 – 3:40pm – 4:30 pm
Room: League Ballroom
Authors: Sarah Allen, Kelly Wright
Presenter: 46
Abstract
Assimilation has plagued the Black community in a multitude of ways for hundreds of years. Most people don’t realize that language has been subject to harsh injustices as much as any other aspect of everyday life, as it was illegal to teach Black people how to read, and Black language production was assigned a ‘sub-standard’ status. The realities of systemic linguistic racism have created a necessity of assimilation for Black language users in professional settings, which in turn presents harmful interpersonal experiences that impact all members of the Black community throughout their entire lives. This project aims to acknowledge and reflect on these shared linguistic experiences each Black professional has, in hopes to increase data and studies on sociolinguistic labor, or “the physical, emotional, and psychological effort put into deploying sociolinguistic resources in a way that is meant to satisfy others†reported by members of the Black community themselves, in an effort to correct past imbalances and injustices in linguistic data collection. My research project involves participating in qualitative data analysis of 17, 2- hour interviews from various Black professionals in Detroit. This method involves tagging transcribed interviews with codes related to research questions and then using an analytic software package to find and examine patterns that arise across the dataset. Most importantly, this research hopes to reveal that Black professionals report similar experiences with discrimination in the workplace and those collected narratives, with the added weight of our analytic findings, will be used to advocate for linguistic justice.
Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences
