Articulating Our Vision and Claiming Our Place: Personal Reflections on Language, Linguistics, and the Academy

Inclusion in Linguistics, edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, is a masterfully shaped collection of reflections on how to better frame and accomplish the work of making the field of linguistics—and by extension the academy—more meaningfully inclusive for historically marginalized scholars and communities. And for myself as a scholar of African-American Language and oral history who is also a queer, cisgender, African-American woman, one of the first in her predominantly working-class, Southern American family to enter academia, Inclusion in Linguistics provided many painful reminders of the challenges that many of us still face as we navigate the deeply colonial, White-supremacist, ableist, trans-phobic, classist, and patriarchal system (among many, many other intersections of oppression) that is the Western academy. Yet, after taking time to digest, reflect on, and sometimes relive the pain and frustrations embedded in these pieces, I was also heartened by the affirmations provided by the scholars and activists in this collection and through the clearly articulated and effective pathways that they propose to help move the field forward. While I will not revisit each contribution in this volume, I will highlight the major themes that resonated with me deeply on both a personal and professional level. I will also briefly articulate a few important questions that this volume provoked for me as both a scholar and mentor of future linguists. Inclusion in Linguistics is divided into four sections: Part one takes an intersectional lens, considering how the themes of disability, sexuality, geography, gender, and race help broaden our understanding of the scope of inclusion. Part two works to highlight underexamined contexts, geographic regions, and student populations including first-generation scholars, students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), issues in Indian linguistics, and natural language processing. Part three explores the creation and use of inclusive teaching resources in primary, secondary, and higher education contexts. Finally, part four highlights the need for stronger community collaborations and partnerships that push linguistics beyond the academy. Overall, the most salient point of resonance for me, which was modeled throughout each piece in this volume, is the notion of positionality, which encourages each of us to think seriously about where we are situated in the academy and how we can each use our social location—and the relative privileges of those social locations—to promote greater inclusion and institutional change. And as many of the scholars in this volume have articulated, members of historically excluded and marginalized communities often endure a “death by a thousand cuts” on our way into the profession, severely limiting the extent of our influence in shaping the trajectory of the field. For myself, as an undergraduate and then graduate student who studied both English and then Linguistics at a regionally serving public institution in North Carolina and then at a flagship public institution in Illinois, my journey to becoming an academic linguist has been fraught with challenges, many of which have led to feelings of imposter syndrome coupled with feelings that I am not truly a “real” academic linguist. And while I have often experienced this imposter syndrome as a personal or intellectual failing, I was heartened to read the observations made by scholars like Iara Mantenuto, Tamaya Levy, Stephanie Reyes, and Zhongyin Zhang (Increasing Access and Equity for First-Generation Scholars in Linguistics) who remind us that “academic success cannot be detached from social status and economic resources” (140). Through their analysis, readers are reminded that the insecurities that we feel may reflect broader, unspoken discourses that elevate the “normative” student who, based on the prestige of their family background, has access to a kind of “academic capital” that allows them to succeed and thrive in academia. In contrast, first-generation students and other marginalized groups often “have a different form of cultural capital that is not valued in academia” (131). Thus, with life experiences and unique ways of viewing the world that are often discounted and sidelined, our struggles are compounded as we seek access to advanced study. In my own case, my White, often middle-class, standardized-English-speaking American classmates, many who also had graduate education modeled for them in their families of origin, seemed as if they were almost destined to move from their undergraduate programs directly into doctoral study. However, I did not have the luxury of seeing that pathway so clearly modeled for me in my own family. Drawing from my family's oral history, I believe that my positionality relative to the academy starts with the matriarch of my father's family, who was affectionately known as “Doc” by her 10 children and relatives. Although living a complicated and sometimes tragic life of her own, Doc was able to support her family by successfully completing the highest level of training that she had access to as a cosmetologist. And once she earned her trade license as a master cosmetologist, her instructors celebrated her receipt of what was for them the equivalent of a doctorate in her field (hence the affectionate nickname). Although my grandmother was the first doctor that I had ever encountered, I was ushered into a deeply intellectual world by my father, her oldest son. He, a well-traveled, disabled Vietnam veteran and artist, showed my brother and I that an intellectual was not just someone who had the power, prestige, and pedigree of a formal academic institution but someone who made sense of the world using a critical lens that was shaped by their own life experiences. My father also had a voice whose deep timbre immediately commanded attention and whose fluid speaking style could, in our minds, easily sway the world. Listening to his voice and the voices of the elders of his generation, I was always keenly aware that our language, which I now know to reflect the linguistic genius of the descendants of enslaved Africans in America, was a powerful tool for claiming our place in the world. As a child and young adult, I was always drawn to the spoken and written representation of African-American Language but never knew that it had a name because my teachers and family never spoke of our dialect in affirming ways. Instead, the powerful, commanding speech of my working-class Black family was always deemed too “ghetto” or too “ignorant” to be taken seriously, forcing me on a pathway to the mastery of standardized-English at the expense of fluency in my home language. But as I listened to my father debate with relatives about politics or the economy and as we sat together in the living room listening to recordings of his favorite comedian Richard Pryor, I realized that each of the earlier negative descriptors was senseless to me since I instinctively saw the beauty and power of our language. And well before I knew that linguistics was even a field, I was drawn as an English major to the loving representations of the voices of Black characters in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God and to the written and auditory masterpiece of novels and movies like Alice Walker's The Color Purple. This early focus on the style and timbre of my father's speech and public representations of Black language became the inspiration for my earliest publications where I explored the ways that Black public speakers switch masterfully between speaking styles that index power and religious authority (Britt 2011) or the way that performers like Richard Pryor use language to both project and critique elements of Black religious and social life (Britt 2016). Yet, while my love of African-American Language is grounded in a long family and community tradition of linguistic artistry, my ability to study this language as an academic professional has not come so easily. This draws me to my second point of resonance with the volume that was made most evident by Filipinx American scholar Julien De Jesus (We Need to Be Telling Our Own Stories: Creating a Home for Filipinx Americans in) who draws our attention to a critical question of how to make linguistics an intellectual home for individuals from historically marginalized communities (59). And while De Jesus's commentary draws directly from the experiences of Filipino students in linguistics programs in America, the stories that they articulated felt deeply familiar to me. For example, De Jesus and their participants’ experiences of racioethnic isolation, linguistic and cultural exoticization, and racism, which mirror many of my own experiences as a Black student, remind many of us of deeply problematic tendencies in Linguistics and in the academy more broadly that create a hostile and unwelcoming climate for historically othered individuals. As De Jesus points out, in this intellectual climate, the work of scholars of color is often deemed too applied or personal as opposed to the “real scholarly” work done by more theory-oriented researchers (71). Thus, research trends toward favoring quantitative approaches that often feel reductive and that flatten the human experience as opposed to more qualitative research that situates our work in the stories, histories, and social contexts of the communities that we study can be deeply alienating for scholars like me who wish to highlight the full humanity of our own communities. Even for myself as a scholar of African-American Language, one of the most widely studied varieties of the English language, I still find myself battling reductive research trends and pressures to collapse the story of my father, his mother, and our linguistic community into a collection of data points that correlate with a limited selection of linguistic variables. And while my own core training as a linguist has prepared me to answer deeply theoretical and important questions about language in its most abstract forms, I had to both elect to specialize in sociolinguistics and take extensive coursework outside my graduate program in fields like anthropology and communications, all while conducting my own survey of insights from history, sociology, and urban geography. At the time, I intuitively understood that each of these steps, which are often not part of the standard training that many linguists receive, was necessary to help me better understand how to situate my own analyses of African-American Language and other cultural practices in their proper social and historical contexts. Thus, as De Jesus aptly calls to mind, how do we as scholars from historically excluded communities adequately honor the voices of our elders and the communities that we love when working in a field that seems, both through the lack of in-depth training in socio-cultural approaches to the study of language and through the privileging of certain methodologies, to effectively erase our community stories? Furthermore, even after overcoming the hurdle of receiving the depth of graduate-level training that allows us to examine the full range of linguistic and cultural practices of our communities, how do we as historically marginalized scholars gain access to the resources to best support our long-term career progression in the field? For example, Lynn Hou and Kristian Ali (Critically Examining Inclusion and Parity for Deaf Global South Researchers of Colour in the Field of Sign Language Linguistics) in their discussion of the lack of inclusion of deaf linguists, particularly those from the Global South, in more prestigious Global North conference venues and Jon Henner (How to Train Your Abled Linguist: A Crip Linguistics Perspective on Pragmatic Research) both critique (along with other scholars in this volume) a “fly in, fly out” or “parachute science” (32) model of research whereby linguists with greater resources and social capital extract language data and resources from historically exploited communities. This issue became most salient for me as I found myself working under the pressure of the tenure clock as a newly minted academic. After completing my doctoral program in 2011, I found myself in Flint, Michigan, a Black-majority, working-class, post-industrial city that had already experienced decades of economic decline before my arrival. And as many may know from widespread media reporting on the Flint Water Crisis, I arrived in my tenure-track position a few years before our city's water was poisoned through the callous neglect of government agents. Yet, while the tenure time clock and the pressures of an incessant “publish or perish” academic culture called for the quick extraction of linguistic data from the community where I lived and worked, my new community, its well-established and vocal community activists and advocates, and my deeply reflective and justice-oriented students demanded both a true recognition of their humanity and the establishment of a reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationship between the community and the institutions that served it. Thus, it was my time in Flint and the on-the-ground training that I received from my community there (as opposed to a more theory-oriented core training in formal linguistics) that impressed upon me the importance of considering the deep humanity of my community as reflected in the stories that they told. As a result, through the Vehicle City Voices project (Britt 2025) and the oral histories that we collected, my students, our community partners, and I were able to use oral history as a vehicle for examining what was happening to all of us (both in the present and past) and to provide a platform for Flint residents to tell their own stories on their own terms. A deeper analysis of these oral histories also reveals the importance and power of storytelling in challenging and rewriting deeply damaging mass-mediated narratives that cast predominantly Black and working-class communities like Flint as “apocalyptic” and “undesirable.” Using scholarly research to bring attention to these narratives is critical since mass-mediated master narratives like these can ultimately lead to the types of disenfranchisement and institutionalized violence suffered by residents during the Flint Water Crisis (Britt 2018). Overall, projects like this one, which straddles the fence between linguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, and community activism, are only possible by taking a more ethical, expansive, and inclusive approach to conducting linguistic research, a point advocated by many of the scholars in Inclusion in Linguistics. Yet, while my work in Flint was deeply rewarding and life-altering for me, my professional experiences also showed deep kinship with the struggles of several scholars in this volume. For example, although my research and professional stance were deeply enriched during my time in Flint where I ultimately received tenure, my access to top linguistics conferences in the field was severely limited by the financial resources available to me at my regional-serving campus, a point that was mirrored in the work of Hou and Ali. Furthermore, my students, whose lives and linguistic experiences could not be reduced to mere exemplars or theoretical points, required a more humanistic mode of engagement, particularly as I worked to introduce them to the field. Thus, as illustrated by Jamie A. Thomas (Community College Linguistics for Educational Justice: Content and Assessment Strategies that Support Antiracist and Inclusive Teaching), who explores pedagogical strategies that highlight researchers and their personal journey as a way of humanizing higher education, Jenny Lederer (Texts, Tweets, Twitch, TikTok: Computer-Mediated Communication as an Inclusive Gateway to Linguistics), who advocates using technologies and practices that challenge classroom hierarchies of knowledge, Candice Y. Thornton (For the Culture: Pathways in Linguistics for Black and HBCU Scholars), who explores HBCUs as pathways to linguistics, and Rhonda Chung and John Wayne N. dela Cruz (Pedagogies of Inclusion Must Start from Within: Landguaging Teacher Reflection and Plurilingualism in the L2Classroom), who advocate for the land-based concept of landguaging, as we work to develop a decolonial approach to linguistics, we must start with thinking more critically both about how students are introduced to the field and how they relate to themselves, their histories, and the environment as they take ownership of knowledge production. Ultimately, each of the contributions to Inclusion in Linguistics leads to a final question in my mind. That is: how do we continue to do our work in ways that honors the voices and humanity of the communities that we represent and the students that we mentor? In my work mentoring students both in Flint and in my current role as a non-tenure track faculty at a prestigious, private, Southern US university, I have also had to take into consideration how to best support—and even shield students from systemic harm—as they consider linguistics as a potential field of study. And as I commiserate with students, sharing with them the raw humanity of the personal experiences that drive my own research, my office has necessarily become a place of refuge and reflection for students, particularly African-American students, international students, queer students, and students of color, who are working through deeper personal and academic questions around the intersections of language, race, gender, and identity. Sadly, in many of my conversations with these immensely gifted students, we often wonder whether linguistics (in the way that it is currently taught in many major universities in the United States) will provide them with the toolkit needed to adequately honor the full range of linguistic and cultural practices of their communities. And while recent volumes like Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics by Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz and justice-oriented approaches modeled by a long history of sociolinguistics-informed researchers and educators give us great hope, the scholars and contributors to Inclusion in Linguistics and the experiences of myself and my current students remind us that there is much more to be done to make the broader field of linguistics more inclusive and accessible to all.