Betsy Evans, (Associate Professor, UW Department of Linguistics), Russell Hugo (2016 PhD; Assistant Director, UW Language Learning Center), and Alex Panicacci (Postdoctoral Fellow, UW Department of Psychology), some of the members of the Linguistic Bias Working Group, presented on ‘Language as Part of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda’ on May 13, 2022, as part of a colloquium on Social Justice Pedagogies Across Language and Culture Curricula, sponsored by UW’s Simpson Center for the Humanities.
As stated in their abstract, “our aim in this presentation is to raise the topic of language as a critical issue for diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI], because it seems that language is overlooked as a source of bias and discrimination on campus. We argue that not addressing language is simply not addressing DEI completely...This presentation will focus on language as the source of “personally mediated racism” which Charity Hudley describes as ‘the specific prejudicial attitudes involving differential assumptions about abilities, motives, and intentions of others according to race.’ We provide examples of personally mediated racism in order to raise awareness of linguistic bias and suggest developing a system for disseminating this information to campus instructors and students.”