Episode 28 - Salvatore Callesano - “Sociolinguistics and Social Justice”
Published on: August 18, 2022
This final podcast of the second season features Professor Salvatore Callesano. Sal is a sociolinguist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and he told us about the fascinating research he does looking at how language and society interact. He shared how he came to this work (teaser: he’s actually not a native Spanish speaker!) and we got nerdy on linguistics.
Sal shared some findings he and his team found on various ways people speak Spanish in the US and the judgments people make about those different variations both by non-Spanish speakers and by Spanish speakers.
Listen on your favorite podcast app:
Learn more about Sal’s work:
Twitter - @callesano
LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/salvatore-callesano
www.callesano.com
Wonderful folks mentioned on this episode:
Dr. Phillip Carter - identity formation and language
Dr. Aris Moreno Clemons - intersection of race and linguistics
Dr. Anne Charity Hudley - 4th wave of Sociolinguistics meeting Social Justice!
Dr. Christine Mallinson - implicit bias in classrooms
Dr. Susan Aguiñaga - culturally adapted health interventions
Dr. John Rickford & Dr. Sharese King - Language and Linguistics on Trilal
Dr. Callesano’s recommendations for great organizations that support bilingualism and linguistic variation:
Spanish Sin Pena
Entre Dos Podcast
Films about language variation:
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Transcript
Linet 00:00
Hola I have a very special treat in store for you today. I had a chance to talk to a sociolinguist and if you know us personally, you know we're totally into languages and we're very very nerdy about it. So this is really fun. We did get a little bit nerdy but most importantly, we got social justice-y. We got community-y. We talked about bilingualism, perceptions, what to do about them, some really, really cool research, and intersections out there with Dr. Callesano. You are in for a super treat. Enjoy!
Linet 00:52
Hi everyone! Hola todos! Linet here.
Alexis 00:55
and Alexis,
Linet 00:56
your co-hosts, both she/her, bringing you impactful stories and interviews from our communities to you and exploring how we can support each other.
Alexis 01:05
The unconscious bias project is based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California on unseeded ancestral homelands belonging to the Ramaytush Ohlone, and Muwekma Ohlone peoples, some of whom speak the language Chochenyo. We encourage you to learn more about the Ohlone people on our website, which is in the podcast links. Also, just as a quick note, I just went to the Oakland Museum of California last weekend and it's really cool. I encourage everyone to go there and check out, also, their exhibits which feature the voices of indigenous Californians.
Linet 01:40
So today - big drumroll - we'd like to welcome Dr. Salvatore Callesano, whose pronouns are he/him/el. Dr. Callesano is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He is a sociolinguist, which means that he researches and teaches about how language and society interact. His current focus is on how people react to language variation, or in other words, the social judgments that are made about how other people speak and how those judgments lead to instances of discrimination. So welcome, Sal!
Sal 02:17
Thank you so much. Thank you both for having me here. It's great.
Alexis 02:21
Sal, to lead off, we just said that you are a sociolinguist and Linet said that that's how language and society interact. But that might be nebulous for some of our listeners, like that, you know, might seem very broad. So can you tell us more about what exactly that means? And what your work generally looks like?
Sal 02:45
Yeah, absolutely happy to. So it's a great question. And you're right, it is a bit nebulous, because sociolinguistics is, as I like to say, sort of everything and everywhere. And so when I talk to people about what sociolinguistics is, I like to talk about some phrases that, you know, all of us here might have heard or even have said. So these are phrases like, “I don't have an accent,” or “technology is ruining the English language,” or “I can't even understand my own kids,” right? Or this, you know, “all the people in the South speak slow” or “people in New York speak. They're aggressive by the way they speak,” right? All of that is the interaction of language and society or sociolinguistics. So basically, what we look at is where any, what we call, level of linguistics and this could be sound, what we call phonetics and phonology, the structure of sentences, syntax, or even discourse, and pragmatics (where meaning changes according to context) - that all interacts with every facet of society. So that could be school, law, work, home, etc. And so one of the big ideas about sociolinguistics is that we study language as a social phenomenon. And that, to me is really the thing that distinguishes sociolinguistics from other fields of linguistics that may study language as sort of a faculty of mind type of academic discipline.
Linet 04:27
Ooh, that was really interesting.
Sal 04:31
Yeah. Oh, I didn't really answer your second question. My apologies there. So you asked sort of what does the work look like in my work specifically, and so sociolinguistics can look like a lot of different things. In the 1960s, when what's known as variationist sociolinguistics came about by work mostly by William Labov. This work was produced through the sociolinguistic interview, so a lot of it is interview based. My work, however, tends to look towards surveys and actually to computer experiments that study these judgments that listeners make about speakers. And so on the one hand, sociolinguist can look at production and look at how and when and why languages and dialects are what we call varieties. And then the next step in that is to say, okay - we know the variation now, how do people perceive that variation. And so you can do that through surveys, experiments, even through interviews, as well. And then following that, my work then turns to look at the overall everyday language experience, primarily of us LatinX communities and how those experiences are represented actually on social media. People, both outside and inside of social media are very opinionated. And you know, people tend to be very loyal to their language and language varieties. And so I look at, through social media, how people express the ideas they have about language. And then when you put those two together, right, this is where we can start to look at questions of discourses of discrimination, what it looks like for caregivers trying to raise bilingual children, and what types of community resources might we be able to create to better support marginalized speakers and their languages.
Linet 06:17
So cool.
Alexis 06:18
Also, quickly, you use the word pragmatics. People think that that just refers to practical things. Can you give us a little bit more on what pragmatics is?
Sal 06:31
Absolutely, yeah. So at least when I teach linguistics courses, what I say is: pragmatics is meaning within contexts. And so this contrasts with an area of linguistics known as semantics, which is sort of your, quote unquote, pure study of meaning. However, pragmatics is contextually-based meaning (and this is really where all meaning kind of comes from anyway). So to give you an example, pragmatics is, you know, when somebody walks into a room that has somebody else in it, who might hear the message, and they say, (let's say it's, it's, it's warm outside, right, and it's really cold in the room), and the person walking in the room says, “ooh, it's really cold in here,” right? That might be a pragmatic message. So the other person to open the window. Right? So it's the meaning of that, the meaning of that sentence is more than just the word that was used. Right? It was those contextual clues for additional meaning. That's how I understand pragmatics. Yeah.
Alexis 07:33
Okay, so would this also be like, “I, I need you to do me a favor.” Was that, would that like, and how, like, there's, there's all of those layers in there? Would that also fall into pragmatics, like dissecting those layers? It's like, oh, we're not just talking about favor here.
Sal 07:50
Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah. And that's a great way to put it when we're not just talking about what was said, right. And the way, I like how you use the word layers, because there's the words that were said, the structure, and know the order in which they were in, and then also how that statement slash question sounded, right? And all of those things interact to create pragmatic or even pragmatic variation. So another example for, you know, the listeners here is, what is small talk and how small talk and vary cross culturally, right? So think about when you're in an elevator, perhaps, you know, with people you don't know, in an English speaking environment? What's the topic of conversation in an elevator - if there is any?
Alexis 08:33
I mean, if it's in New England, then I think it's usually the weather. And if it's in California, it's astrology, but you know, okay.
Sal 08:47
Fantastic
Alexis 08:47
Being a little sarcastic.
Sal 08:47
Only little. But that is actually a phenomenal example of what we call pragmatic variation. That's - that's pragmatics, language use and meaning and context, right? And so there can be geographic variation with small talk in an elevator. But from the research that I've been seeing - let's say we were comparing English to Spanish, right? From what I understand pragmatic - or the elevator conversation in Spanish tends to be about more personal questions related to the speakers and the listeners in that elevator talking about how many kids they have, what work do their children do, whereas, you know, in the US, and in English, we would focus on non-personal topics, right? Whether astrology is personal. But yeah, so some differences there, right, and that's pragmatics.
Linet 09:35
I love that you caught onto that, Alexis, because we actually talk to people about how to deliver interventions when we're talking about intervening in moments of bias. Remember the bystander cartoon of the like, oh, that sounded like a little, you know, or that was reinforcing a sexist stereotype, which I'm sure you didn't mean to do. And we're like, okay, this isn’t about being passive aggressive, right? So like the delivery is important, right? You're like, wow, that sounded like us reinforcing a sexist stereotype, you know, you're instantly feeling guilty, right? Like, oh shit, I did something terrible where like, “hey, like, can I say no, like you're reinforcing a sexist stereotype, I'm sure that was not your intention” makes you feel a lot less hurt or like, you know, called out than if you, you know, than if it was it was done the other way, which I think that's, that's really interesting.
Sal 10:34
Yeah, you just hit on what, you actually just performed one of the things that, you know, many linguists might actually catch on to which is these. You sort of perform two variations of the same thing, right? And what did you change, you change what we call your intonation across the phrase, right? And that's one of the biggest mechanisms that is used for pragmatics.
Alexis 10:57
I had a student one time who said, I think I want to grow up to become a linguist. And, wow, as a person in my class, another student said, “oh, because you like languages?” And she responded with “no, because I liked language.” And I was like, oh, wow, for the eighth grader, you're awfully perceptive on that difference?
Sal 11:24
Absolutely. That's another level for an eighth grader. That's incredible. Oh, yeah.
Linet 11:29
Why did you want to start doing sociolinguist? What was like the journey that brought you here? And why is it so important to you?
Sal 11:36
So for me, I got into sociolinguistics through some what I think is my journey to sociolinguistics today was my journey about in the eighth grade starting to learn Spanish as a second language. So I am a first language speaker of English and a second language speaker of Spanish and a third language speaker of Portuguese. And, for me, when it came time to specifically study abroad, during my third year of college, I studied abroad for one year, but in two different Spanish speaking countries, Argentina and Spain, specifically, in Buenos Aires and Madrid within each of those countries. And, you know, I had been taking Spanish in school settings, you know, as a class for years. I was a major in college. And the Spanish that I was learning, while it was useful and helpful and got me to a place in my proficiency where I could communicate, I found that I really learned to communicate in Spanish confidently, and that's the key there, confidently, after studying abroad. And so while I was living in Argentina, you know, I, it was my goal, to be perceived as someone who was from Buenos Aires that was my goal in my head. One day, it happened and I was very happy. But that meant that it was actually while I was getting my hair cut, which for second language learners, if you're getting your haircut and it's in a different country, sometimes that can be the most stressful environment because that is not the vocabulary that you learn in the classroom. But it was in that moment, so specific - like in English, when I get my hair cut, I say, you know, I want to one, faded up, mid fade. To this day, I can't say mid fade in Spanish. I don't know how I would say that. Right? So I remember that being a very stressful moment. But I remember the person asking me, “where are you from?” I said “New York?” And they said, “no, no, but like, what neighborhood from here are you from?” And I was just grinning ear to ear because I felt like I had made it, right, as like a language learner. And then I got on a plane, went to Madrid and I had already had some connections in Spain and Madrid through travels. And so I went to a friend's house and I buzzed up, I got to the door, when I was speaking, greeting him, gave each other a hug, hadn't seen them in years. And through speaking, my friend picked up that I had now acquired a buenteno or Buenos Aires variety of Spanish and the very first thing, I kid you all not, that before I crossed the threshold from the hallway to the apartment, my friend said to me, “they beware keep that incessant always,” which means I'm going to get rid of that accent that you have, right? But he followed it up by telling me that I could basically keep the Argentinian accent in my back pocket and use it for when I wanted to flirt at the bar or the club. Seriously.
Alexis 14:36
putting on an English accent in New York City or something like that.
Sal 14:40
Something like that. Exactly. They were like for your day to day like don't use that. Like you should, you know, we're in Spain, you should, you know, of course, very Spanish very Eurocentric, you should be, you know, speaking like we do here. But you should use it, you know, to pick people up when you're out on the weekends. And I just thought that for me that was such an impactful moment, right, because I had begun to study linguistics, I was sort of figuring it out, figuring out what that was. And then I had this experience. And I was like, wow, you know, kind of like I said earlier - people are really opinionated about language. And I want to know more about that, right? And then, you know, in graduate school, I started taking more courses, actually, outside of linguistics, primarily in Latino/Latina studies. I did a graduate minor in that. And that really, for me, gave me some of the socio historical political background context that is often missing in studies of linguistics, right. And when you have that, and then when you take a sociolinguistic approach to it, the work is stronger, because it's got that context. And you can understand where these judgments are kind of coming from, not that it makes them legit, but it helps you think of ways to combat them. Rather than just saying, “here's the judgment,” now, you say, “here's the judgment and its background,” right. And that can give you a stronger tool for, you know, how to combat those. And all of that sort of intersects with an early experience I had in my life when I was about eight years old, not in eighth grade, and my family who was originally from Brooklyn, New York, moved to New Hampshire, and I remember being in the third grade and having my classmates in the hallway, say, “hey Sal, can you say water again? Can you say coffee, again?” All these things because I spoke a different variety of English than they did, right. And now I've lived across five different states in the US. and so the thing is, language - language variation is a reality in all of our lives even if a lot of people don't think it is and it has material effects. And, and that's what I find interesting to study.
Linet 17:12
I wanted to ask out why Spanish? So you said that you started learning, you started getting into sociolinguistics or in linguistics or, you know, region when you were learning Spanish. What prompted you to learn Spanish?
Sal17:27
Yeah, great question and a question that I get a lot specifically as somebody who is of Italian descent, Italian American. So for me, in going to high school in central New Hampshire, the second language options that I had to choose from were only Spanish and French. There were no other language options. For me, I took Spanish, I don't remember making the decision between Spanish and French. But what I knew was once I took it, it was the class that I enjoyed the most. And because of that, it was a class I dedicated the most time and energy to and then from there, I never stopped.
Linet 18:06
That's really interesting that it was so readily available, because one of the things that I learned, actually, more recently, since I've been in California, was that in California, in ninety-eight-ish Californians voted to pass a ballot called Proposition 227 that imposed restrictions on bilingual education, which made it actually really hard to learn Spanish and make it even harder for LatinX Californians to speak Spanish or continue Spanish learning if they had any in the first place. So that is all tied in there. And yeah, so I think it's really cool that you get to talk about all this stuff, and that your work goes towards understanding.
Sal 18:53
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that brings up a phenomenal point that actually has a lot to do with sort of my position to all the work that I do, which is this notion of, it kind of has an unfortunate name, but it's known as elite bilingualism, right. And this is, essentially, I like to talk about it as a question which is whose bilingualism is value, right? And the proposition that you just talked about is the nominal question of the, sort of by birth bilingualism, what we'll call simultaneous bilingualism, right, is often not valued, right, because that bilingualism is associated with brown and black bodies. Whereas somebody like me, who learned Spanish as a second language, right, who actually did not grow up with two languages simultaneously - my current bilingualism is more highly valued at a US society level, right?
Alexis 19:15
It’s like cosmopolitan.
Sal 20:32
Exactly, exactly right. Whereas we don't value the immigrant parents that move here and acquire English and then who did the same acquisition process without the formal education, right. Though - that type of bilingualism is not valued, because it is coupled with so many other racial and ethnic factors. The bilingualism of somebody, frankly, like me, is much more valued. And this is where that question of elite bilingualism comes in. And that's why I think, you know, that type of Proposition really wouldn't happen in New Hampshire because at least in the school that I was in, there were zero, LatinX children, right? And so that wasn't a question. It's kind of like, I don't know if you guys see it, if you've seen that meme of, and her name is going to escape me, but some daughter of a prince in the UK. There's the meme where she's walking down the steps and then the text on the meme is something like you know, “at two years old, she already speaks three languages” or something like that. And then everybody's commenting on it and be like, so bilingualism is cool if you're rich, right? But like, how many children in the US do the exact same thing if not more, right, but are not part of the English world. See. So now their bilingualism is seen as a detriment to their development.
Linet 21:23
I have had to have that conversation at numerous parks. Because I speak to my kid mostly in Spanish. And I had somebody come up be like, “hey, so, you know, my daughter's child, you know, they're trying to teach her, is it gonna delay them? Like they're a little late in like getting all their words in?” And I'm like, “no, no.” I mean, I didn't - I was nice. But I was like, have you looked at the entire rest of the world? Like seriously?
Sal 21:57
No, in that situation, I like to ask people, “what percentage of the world they think is bilingual?” The numbers are all over the place, just absolutely. All over the place. Because frankly, people have no idea. You know, their view of the world is the US to be frank. Right. And yeah, when you tell them that the number circles around 60% of the world, right? They're like, wow,
it's high.
Alexis 22:27
It's such a different expectation.
Sal 22:27
Yeah, absolutely. 100%.
Alexis 22:27
You told us a little bit about what you do. Like what sorts of specific studies, populations, who are you working with? Like, so, what is that field that you're in and what sorts of projects are ongoing with that?
Sal 22:41
Yeah, absolutely. I was just talking today with my graduate students about this, the, this idea of sub sub sub fields, right? So we all do sociolinguistics, but like, what do you really do, right? And so for me, currently, my work is focusing on linguistic perception, or language attitudes. So again, these judgments that people make about language variation. So again, there's one side of sociolinguistics that looks at the production. So finding what we call the ordered heterogeneity or the systematicity behind language variation, right? Rarely, anything about language is random. And so we find the science behind it. Then the other question is, okay, well, you know, language is a two way street, what judgments do people have about the variation that we study. And so my work is primarily focused in Miami, Florida, which is a really interesting major LatinX city in the United States. It is one of the largest situations of bilingualism across the Americas. And it's argued to be the most dialectically-diverse Spanish speaking city in the entire world. So from a sociolinguistic perspective, it is a really fruitful place for looking at research, and specifically looking at judgments that people make. Because if you think about the everyday interaction between people, or interactions, right, language is always a part of that equation, right? Snap judgments, as you both know, are a part of every single interaction and one of those snap judgments is about language, right. And so in the context of Miami, in collaboration with Dr. Phillip Carter, who's at Florida International University, we have conducted a number of studies looking first at how people in Miami make judgments towards three different varieties or dialects of Spanish - that is Spanish from Spain, Spanish from Colombia and Spanish from Cuba, right. Three majors of global varieties of Spanish but also varieties of Spanish that you would hear on the daily in Miami. And what we found through that survey study, which is what we call a modified match, guise, which essentially means we have people listen to voices, but they don't know exactly who they're listening to. And we had to listen to a voice, like I said, from Spain, Cuba and Colombia. But what we also did was we did a manipulation on the experiment. And so when the people were listening to the voices, we also put on the screen this made up information about where the speakers parents were from. So it might sound a little crazy, but we had something like this. The participant would be listening to a voice from Cuba and we said, this person's parents are from Spain. Right. And we wanted to know, what is the effect of that label? Because we know from research on studies in Spanish dialect, perception that, overwhelmingly, the dialect, or one of the dialects from Spain is going to be perceived as the highest on different scales. So the most, the most educated, the most pleasant to listen to, the most correct. And I want to remind everybody here, these are perceptions, these are judgments, these are not realities. And so they also get perceived to be, you know, in our study, we find that the voice from Spain is associated with the highest annual income, about $10,000 more per year compared to the Colombian and Cuban voices. That's a significant amount of money. You know, this Spanish voice was perceived to be more likely to work in medical sales or to be a lawyer than the other Cuban voices were associated more with, like coffee shop baristas.Yeah, we did find a raising effect. So we did find that when say the Cuban voice was labeled as having parents from Spain, right, which again, wasn't true, we just told the participants that, that there the perception of the Cuban dialect, in that one manipulation, did go up. So there is an effect of just people thinking about Spain, and what that means to them, and how that sort of conditions their perceptions.So that was sort of one of the studies, which ended up being two papers that we published. And now currently under review, we have what is a type of follow up to that study. But this time, we're focusing on bilingualism, we're focusing on Spanish and English together at the same time, which for me, and my orientation to my work is really important. Because oftentimes, research, particularly on Spanish in the US, or US LatinX communities, tends to focus on either English, or Spanish rather than English and Spanish at the same time. And while sometimes researchers may be more inclined to work on just English or just Spanish, or that may be their particular research question, the work can also be viewed as doing a little bit of a disservice to the community because U.S LatinX communities don't live their lives in either or right, they live their lives in this and they live their lives in both languages at the same time. And so I find my approach to my research is that it's best to do research that best reflects the communities that we're working with. And so we need to study both together. And so what we designed was, as I'm sure people here are familiar, was three implicit association tests, or three IATs, to study these quick snap millisecond long judgments towards Spanish and English. And so this is really where bias comes into - into my work. I did not look at perceptions of specific linguistic variables, that is specific sounds or sentence structures within each language. We're actually just working with the concept of Spanish and the concept of English from the perspective of bilingual Miamians. And, you know, Miami is a really interesting place for everything I said earlier, but also for the way in which it is narrative eyes or the way in which people talk about Miami. So people may hear these suggestions that -
29:07
oh, if you go to Miami, you need to know Spanish to get by, or if you want to live in Miami, you need to speak Spanish. Miami is quote, the capital of Latin America, these are actually terms that have come out of the field of sociology, right. So you may think that, you know, because we know here in the US English is, you know, sort of at the ideological top, it holds a lot of sociolinguistic power, as we call it. And you may think that in the context of Miami that that might flip that. These power structures might flip and that Spanish might sort of take the cake here or win out on this perception game. And what we're finding is that it doesn't, it doesn't. Actually Miami just follows the sort of status quo with regard to the power structures of language and so, across three pretty different IATs, and different IATs in the sense of we use different linguistic stimuli, text stimuli, oral stimuli and even stimuli that were nonce words or words that we just made up to look like English and Spanish. There were 89 participants across all three experiments. And there were zero, bilingual Miamians, who showed a strong automatic preference for Spanish. Zero. Which is an incredible finding, incredible finding. And so for us the conversation, then, the data told us the conversation isn't about whether people have a bias toward Spanish or English, it actually is just focusing on the English and saying how strong is their bias for English, right, we found that people who had Spanish as their first language still had an implicit bias in favor of English, we found that people who were born outside of the US primarily in Spanish speaking countries, had implicit biases in favor of English. And that the longer they spend in the US, specifically in Miami, their implicit bias towards English got stronger. I find it to be really interesting stuff. But what we're moving on to, in the next stage of the research, is a replication of this study. But this time to run the IATS in Spanish. Because all three previous IITs were conducted in English, that is, the instructions were given in English, the demographic surveys people took were written in English. So there was a lot of English sort of happening, right, which may have affected the data in some way. And so we want to see what happens if we just run the same study, but run it in Spanish, where people are running in code switching in Spanglish, and both at the same time. Will that affect the results? Right? I'm not sure because what we've been seeing from decades of research now is that, you know, people can make all the changes they want to experimental design, or even to, you know, day to day language programming, but it's very difficult, but not impossible, to combat these sort of national, global language ideologies that dictate how our perceptions go.
Alexis 32:13
Like, as soon as the studies are out, I think, you know, Linet and I are going to have to lift those for some of our workshops, because, you know, one of the things that we talk about actually, and we directly tell people is like, just because you are from that group, does not mean that you are free of bias against that group that we can be biased against our own groups.
Sal 32:36
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, this, that's exactly what the paper is showing, you know, specifically for our Spanish speaking individuals in Miami. I mean, just because you are Latinx and you speak Spanish, Miami, that doesn't mean you know, unconsciously you have a bias in favor of Spanish, you might have a bias actually against it. Why? Because you exist in a world in which every single day, implicitly, you're shown and taught, right, that English is the way to success, that English is the language of the US. Right? And specifically in Miami. You know, one of the ways in which this surfaces is - I remember when I was living in teaching in Miami, I would have students tell me that they would drive maybe a half an hour north and cross into Broward County, because we're talking about Miami Dade County and South Florida, just north is Broward County and Fort Lauderdale area, and just upon crossing this, you know, nothing but a political border, the students would start to get asked by people what country they were from, while they had been born and raised 20 minutes/30 minutes south in Miami Dade County. Right. And so there's a whole bunch of ideological work going on there that plays a role in building and maintaining these language biases.
Alexis 34:00
All of these biases are so fascinating and like figuring out what we can do about them.
Sal 34:08
Yeah, this is a great question. It's actually a question that I have often with my partner who is an academic, but in the social and behavioral sciences, actually working with Physical Activity and Aging and older Latinos. And she's an interventionist, right? So in their research, they do interventions, right, with the community as community based research. Linguistics is to date far from a community based research paradigm. Linguistics is known to sort of enter into a community, take its data and leave, right without leaving any tools for perhaps helping communities maintain Spanish or helping communities combat these judgments. And so this is something that I've been thinking a lot about is sort of what could be the sociolinguistic intervention for the community? I don't yet have the answer to it, but it's certainly a question that's on my mind.
Alexis 35:10
And with that, we are going to go to a quick break. We'll be back in just a moment after some announcements.
Seth 35:23
Hi, everyone, this is Seth and I am one of the audio editors and volunteers here at UBP. The unconscious bias project brings creative accessible evidence based solutions for unintentional bias to academic, technological, governmental organizations and beyond. We sustain a welcoming home for inquisitive and creative minds and encourage a growth mindset, working by the model of 0% guilt 100% empowerment. Please subscribe or follow our Facebook and Instagram for the latest in events and how you can learn more and be involved. Also, take a look and check out our guests website and learn more. Look for that information in the description section of your podcast or on our website.
Alexis 36:17
I imagine that representation would have a lot to do with it. And in terms of you know, both who's in power, but also like, what media people are consuming?
36:32
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. One of the pieces is certainly representation. That comment made me think of something that I was recently writing about, which is, I'm not sure if you both recall, but the very first day of 2016. Well, not the year, Trump's presidency in 2016. Whitehouse.gov. had, I know, right, what a day to recall. Um, whitehouse.gov had, you know, it's in English, but it had its secondary pages with all the information in Spanish, right? Available to the millions of Spanish speakers in the US. Well, on the very first day, all of the Spanish language versions of the website were deleted.
Linet 37:20
I remember that. I remember that. That seems like such a nothing, thing now. I remember being like, yep, true colors right here. And then I've been like, proven wrong. No, no, that was just like, the surface layer colors like this, this this shit goes way deeper than this.
Sal 37:42
Exactly. Right.
Linet 37:46
Yeah, it's interesting. So I - two things. One is interesting that you said like, what is a socio linguistic intervention? And I wonder if it's, you know, sociolinguistic? Like, is it sociolinguistic? I mean, okay, media, you know, could be sociolinguistic, because then you see examples of this, and they're more pervasive, there's more representation, both in leadership and in media, I think all of those things really help. I think we've really seen just, I'm sure there's studies already, but you know, I think, you know, just even like, the response that people had to Encanto, you know, everyone was like, “oh, my gosh, that's me,” both representation of like, different bodies representation to like different skin tones representation of, like, in the Spanish version, like different representation of different, slightly different styles of speaking and people from the area would know, like, the different kinds of dress, and different, like cultural hints that are dropped, like, wow, you know, you're actually seeing things, like pointing with your mouth is something that's very Colombian, and that's something that was part of the movie. For example, I think that all helps, but it's also I mean, I think it - one of the, at the core of our workshops, knowing, right, awareness is the first step, right? So like, awareness is number one. Number two is like reconciling the fact in yourself that, hey, you're probably doing it too. And this is how this shows up. And then, you know, three is like, okay, I know this is going on. I can tell that I'm, I'm enabling it or doing it or, you know, because of it because I wasn't aware of it that I was, you know, worsening it or whatever. And then it's action right? So action in yourself, action with others and what that looks like in a, you know, it's really, it's like a systematic thing. So, but our friend of the pod and friend of UBP, 559 mural project, they are a nonprofit that brings conversation about social justice, historic inequities, and like current issues to the Central Valley. And the Central Valley has this really interesting deep history where like a good chunk of it had a very large African American population, but then they were driven out. And then it was replaced by, you know, a lot of workers, so people that we're going to go into the fields and you know, pick, you know, our strawberries or lettuce, like all of that stuff that we have in our groceries, and we send, you know, all around the country and in different parts of the world, which are primarily LatinX, both, you know, Californians as well as immigrants. And even with this very large, Spanish-speaking, LatinX population, it is very segregated in terms of services. So there's like issues of food deserts, issues of, like, accessibility to - to medicine and health care. I mean, the huge fires that happened, the pandemic like it really highlit, you know, like how horribly, we're treating folks that are cultivating our foods that are growing our food, they're picking our food, they're bringing it to us, and their local governments. Even if they have high representation, are very biased against, you know, for 559 mural project, approving murals that are like, hey, guess what, part of our history in this country in this specific area was pushing out black people. Part of our history was destroying the indigenous population that was here. Part of their history is erasure of like the Yokut tribe, people, and, you know, our shared connections with slavery and our shared connections with colonialism, and like all of these different things if people don't want to talk about it. So it's like that in-group bias is strong. And like this social, cultural language, even - all of these conversations are in English, right? I don't know if they're scared, maybe I don't know what Selena would save. But maybe they're scared of talking about it. They're scared of bringing up. Like she wanted to bring, I think one of their murals had a list of banned books, like one of their mural’s central characters was sitting on top of a bunch of banned books. And one of the council members that didn't want to approve the mural was concerned that she was like, I don't want to talk about critical race theory. It's interesting. I mean, both, you know, right now we're talking in a post SCOTUS decision time, where it's, you know, we can really see the far reaching impacts of elections, we can see the far reaching impacts of like, individual and small group, small groups of like, extreme thinking, or, you know, things that just get, you know, proliferated, shared on social media, and, you know, misrepresentation of facts, myths, and like, lack of understanding of, you know, the systemic power of decisions that you're like, well, obviously, this is a decision for me, no, actually, it affects, like, so many more people in our intersectionality-speaking, it affects even more, you know, I think, bringing it back to language, you know, just even having so having the studies, I just have to go back, come back to this point, having studies that are centering both English and Spanish, because that is, that is the context for the communities that you're working with. Like, that's really powerful. Like, it's, it's so - it's that simple to notice, like, hey, we've been doing it in this particular way, and I can get how we did it that way. But this way, we actually reflect reality, or this way, we actually, you know, can connect further ways communities or, you know, this way, you know, we can actually try, you know, reaching, connecting, understanding, like, just even even that piece is really powerful. So
Sal 44:18
I agree, I think, you know, what, I think one other thing that it does is it allows for greater collaboration within group members, which is something that I think is also necessary in order to start working, you know, maybe as a type of intervention, right, where, you know, the work that we do with communities is so much stronger when you involve the voice of the community, right, to play a role in the design of the project, in the analysis of the data, right. So I know, I know, I've done it. I am a part of the academic system. I have papers where it's just me, right? But I find that it's very important for you know, me to write into the paper that the reader has to understand my analysis through my eyes, right, and my history and my positionality as sort of a non-Latino, second language learner, speaker of Spanish, right. So that would be different. The data may look different, the conclusions, the generalizations may look different if there's a community collaboration in research, and I think that universities and the academy in general are attempting to head in that direction. There are, of course, a number of barriers and paywalls to that, which are really unfortunate. But that, I think, is another way to think about this as an intervention.
Linet 45:47
I'm snapping fingers like nobody's business. Hell, yeah. One of the things that we talk about quite a bit at UBP, is that privilege and marginalization are not a yes, no, you know, easy flip per person. And, you know, we think about how we position ourselves to best represent issues that don't necessarily directly impact our own identities. And you talked about a little bit, in the last answer about how you discuss, you know, you bring attention to the fact that just by you being you, you can see research differently, you can do things differently, you could interpret things differently, your conclusions might be a little different from somebody else, which I know is like such a hard thing for researchers and scientists, definitely academics all around the world, I think, to accept that. Gosh, can I go deeper into that? But I'm interested for you to go further into that. How do you think your own background affects how you do the work?
47:23
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it does write my own background certainly affects the research that I do, because I, as a second language learner of Spanish, actually do not work with other, you know, non Latino, white second language learners, Spanish. I primarily work with simultaneous bilingual, LatinX identified individuals and communities. And so that certainly affects my orientation to the work. Why? Because I, while I may have the linguistic training and the tools, right, to answer the research questions that I may have, right. That's only one piece of it, right. The other thing that, like, you were just saying is sort of, implicitly there is my own history and my own personal experience with, for example, the Miami community and my research are now currently in the Illinois slash Chicago, the LatinX communities, right? My - my positionality to those communities, and my positionality to the Spanish and English languages, right, I was not lucky enough to grow up simultaneously, to be simultaneously bilingual. Right. Spanish then came for me as a second language. And while I'm grateful for that, it certainly is a different and marked history compared to the communities that I work with. And so that's why I think, you know, future studies really need to focus on collaborations, right, working with students of marginalized backgrounds, making space for them at the quote, unquote, research table, including them as co-authors on the paper, right, so that that student from marginalized background can have publications on their CV and then to later get into grad school and to get a job, right. I as a researcher in linguistics come from a space of immense privilege. And so I find that it's on me to make room for others, right. I have the ability to do that. And one of the ways to do that is to, you know, work directly with undergraduate students, for example, that are bilingual, that grew up bilingually, who can approach the data in a way that I can't. And for me what this does, and this is something that I learned from my former mentor and current co-author, Philip Carter from FIU, what that creates is a mentor-mentee advisor advisory relationship that is more egalitarian. Right. So I think that if researchers can approach graduate and undergraduate research as a collaboration rather than this hierarchical relationship, because you know, that'll be stronger, because for me, you know, when I invite, I was just working on an undergraduate thesis last year with a student of mine on linguistic discrimination faced by Latina mothers in the Chicagoland area, and the student who is a Colombian, who was of Colombian background, went out into his home neighborhood, conducted interviews with other Colombian mothers at the daycare that he went to when he was when he was a child, right?
That data, right, those interviews, those discourses that come out of the interview, are so much more reflective of the actual experiences that are faced by Latino mothers every day in that community than if I were to have gone and do those interviews, right. So now it is my job right? To then provide the student with the tools necessary to collaborate with the student to analyze and to bring this paper to, you know, what is the goal in academia, which is the publication, right. It is not my job to step in and do the work myself, it is to be alongside the student, right? For them to sort of fall back on coming to me with questions, and then to co analyze the data with me. What we're finding is that I may pull out different themes from the interviews in the discourses that my student did, right? And that's right there is where you see what effect the positionality of the researcher can have to the work.
Alexis 51:56
to me, being a queer person, and how like, it's so different talking to another queer person who's, you know, asking me questions than it is with a straight person. And I imagine a lot of that must also just have to do with, tell me if this carries over to your work, where I wonder how much of that just have to do with, like the shorthands that I and another queer person would use. And then how that might lead to richer conversations, but also might get lost if other people don't necessarily know the shorthand that we're using and things like that, as they're looking at the data.
Sal 52:29
Oh, absolutely. 100%. And so, this is something that we call in sociolinguistics, the observer's paradox. And so this is the idea that in sort of decades old sociolinguistics, the sociolinguistic interview as a methodology, how does a goal to elicit the quote vernacular of the speaker, right? When in reality, what we elicit in an interview is actually more of a formal register of that speaker, right, because they're sitting in front of somebody who they know is associated with this large rich university institution, you stuck a recorder in their face or on the lapel of their shirt, so the interviewee is likely nervous and is likely going to speak in a more formal manner, right? And so one way to sort of minimize the observer's paradox is to have interviewer interviewee matching as much as possible, right. And so you see that sort of just at the sociolinguistic level in terms of discourse. You also see it, there's interesting work coming out of or that came out of Houston, that showed this where looking at speakers of two different varieties of Spanish and whether the interviewer spoke the same variety as the interviewee or not. And the results were very different when there was a mismatch. And the match. Yeah. So this actually brings up a topic that we call assimilation, sociolinguistic assimilation or convergence or divergence. And this, this is the idea that in everyday conversation, and this also applies to interviews, you talk like the person you're talking to. But there's a caveat there. Right. And this is especially true of teenagers and adolescents, by the way, who are sort of like figuring out, they've learned the language now, but now they're figuring out, like, who they are. And so one of the ways that you do that is through language, but anyway, so when you are converging with somebody that typically means that you are in a conversation with somebody that you subconsciously want to socially align with, you know, maybe somebody that you like, or somebody that you have a similar political affiliation with. But if you're speaking to somebody who is sort of socio-culturally, quote unquote, different than you, we actually subconsciously start to distance ourselves through the minute details of language. So in English for example, this will come out often in our vowels, some consonance, also in things like tone, tone and intonation. Those things will slowly, throughout the interview, start to get further and further apart from one another to mark, as an implicit way of marking, that assumed social distance. Right. And so that's, that's kind of what's happening there.
Alexis 55:21
Thank you so much for all of this amazing conversation. So far, this has been so much fun. As we are wrapping up, we do have one more question specific. So we want to ask, Do you have any resources that you want to plug for our listeners today, people to thank, causes or organizations to promote? Is there anything that you're doing that we should keep an eye out for? Anything like that, that we should, that you want to put on our radars?
Sal 55:47
Okay, awesome. Yes, this one I am ready for all right. So for me, you know, one of the things that's critical about linguistics is that it's so important in our everyday lives, but it's actually a topic of study that people won't even find until, like later in college, right? Like, rarely do you find linguistics in high school, it's starting to come out now it's starting to be developed. But linguistics is so important, I would argue, especially sociolinguistics. But it's something we don't find about until sometimes until it's too late in somebody's career development, right. And so, what I want to encourage people to do, who are interested in language or language variation is to look at some documentaries that have been made by linguists, right. So one in particular is called Talking Black in America. And the other is called Spanish Voices. And these are both organized and created by the language and life project at North Carolina State University. These are two documentaries that will give people a true insight into what is linguistic variation and why linguistic variation matters, in particularly, in black and Latinx communities in the United States. So those, I think, are really nice, you know, sort of non-classroom ways to get into sociolinguistics. Another organization that I actually recently found out about that I want to put on people's radars, for any LatinX bilingual listeners out there who may feel linguistic insecurity about their own Spanish or may have been told that their Spanish is not legit, or they don't feel valued or confident in speaking Spanish, there is an organization called Spanish Sin Pena, which is a great resource for Latin X bilinguals, to come together to speak freely in Spanish in an informal and judgment free zone. I have some friends who are a part of the program and are very, very happy with it. For me, that program is great because it's an example of what we need to be doing to support all communities, which is to create space for those communities. And this is exactly a way to do it. The other thing that I'd like to point out here is just a shout out to some of my collaborators and mentors and linguists that everybody should know about. So I've mentioned a few times now Dr. Phillip Carter at Florida International University, also another collaborator of mine, Eris Clemens at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville does amazing work on raciolinguistics, language and education and black Spanish speakers. And then, to sort of finish off my shout outs I want to put on everybody's radar, Dr. Anne Charity Hudley, who is now at Stanford University. She is the leader of what is known as the fourth wave of sociolinguistics. And this is where sociolinguistics finally meets social justice. And so to quote, Dr. Anne Charity Hudley, from a talk I heard her give about a year ago now, she said, “There is no racial justice, without linguistic justice.” And I think that's something that everybody needs to sort of keep in their mind, in conversations, especially today, when it comes to anything that's going on in this crazy world that we live in, that language is always a part of that conversation, right? So if people are out there who are curious about language, who are writing or creating movies or shows that involve language, reach out to a linguist. We’ll be so happy to talk to you, and to talk about ways in which language can be represented in positive ways.
Alexis 59:25
Thank you so much for all of that. I'm definitely interested in Dr. Hudleys work now, just from you saying that I'm like, wait sociolinguistics meeting social justice? Yes. Sign me up, please.
Sal 59:37
It's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. She, in collaboration with Dr. Christine Mallinson at Maryland, Baltimore County, have for years been building resources to bring linguistic variation or education about linguistic variation to, for example, public school teachers, right. Creating and organizing professional development workshops for teachers to teach them about the linguistic variation that they hear every single day in their classrooms, right, to hopefully work through the implicit biases that teachers have towards the variation that their students bring to the classroom. To validate it, to use it, to teach material to think about the ways in which language for example, you know, the classic example that probably one of my favorite articles in sociolinguistics, was written by John Rickford and Sharese King, about the way in which the Rachel Jeantel testimony in the George Zimmerman murder trial of Trayvon Martin, how her testimony was dismissed as unintelligible because the court system was unprepared to hear her variety of English and how that all correlated with her presence as a black woman in the courtroom. So there's a lot of social work, social justice work to be done. But if you're going to start with anybody in terms of reading, start with Dr. Anne Charity Hudley.
Alexis 1:00:57
Just amazing. Thank you.
Linet 1:01:00
You mentioned a partner that works in the physical space with elders, something like that.
1:01:05
Yes, yes. That's my partner, Dr. Susie Aguinaga, here at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. So her research is focused on physical activity and diet interventions among older Latinos who are at risk for Alzheimer's and Dementia. So she works with older Latino communities, mostly in the Chicagoland area, to figure out the ways in which physical activity, mostly dance, coupled with culturally tailored nutrition, so a mind-diet that is tailored for the Latino community, how the combination of those two things can help delay Alzheimer's and dementia.
Linet 1:01:49
Oh this has been really fun. Really. Thank you so much.
Sal 1:01:52
No, thank you both for having me. It's been great. Really enjoyed it.
Seth 1:02:00
Thanks for listening. You can find more information and donate at unconsciousbiasproject.org Dr. Linet Mera, she/her, and Alexis Krohn, she/her, are your hosts. Seth Boeckman, he/they, is your editor. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to this podcast and follow us. We can be found on Facebook at Unconscious Bias Project, Twitter at UBP underscore stem, LinkedIn, Instagram, or join our mailing list. UBP is a fiscally sponsored project of the social good fund, a tax deductible 501 C three nonprofit organization. If you wish to sponsor us, please contact us in the contact us tab at unconscious bias project.org