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Leveraging linguistic anthropology to analyze everyday bias

Leveraging linguistic anthropology to analyze everyday bias

Leveraging linguistic anthropology to analyze everyday bias

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures | Second Language Acquisition Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm Online - Zoom

How can we address bias in the workplace? One of the best remedies is to understand, in a foundational way, how bias is expressed in interpersonal interactions.

This training uses linguistic anthropology to lay out a clear framework of everyday bias. We will focus on three important components of speech-event analysis in order to unpack how bias is encoded. We will then examine the non-neutrality of language, and how it relates to the frequent gap between intent (good) and impact (not so good). And we will close with analysis and discussion of real-world examples of problematic interactions in academic workplaces.

About the speaker
Dr. Suzanne Wertheim is Founder and CEO of Worthwhile Research & Consulting. After getting her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Berkeley, she held faculty positions at Northwestern, University of Maryland, and UCLA. In 2011, she left the university system in order to apply her expertise to real-world problems. She now specializes in analyzing and fixing workplace culture, especially around issues of bias and communication.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Language Science Center, the NRT grant, and the Departments of Linguistics and Hearing & Speech Sciences and the Second Language Acquisition program from SLLC.

Add to Calendar 11/12/20 12:30 PM 11/12/20 2:00 PM America/New_York Leveraging linguistic anthropology to analyze everyday bias

How can we address bias in the workplace? One of the best remedies is to understand, in a foundational way, how bias is expressed in interpersonal interactions.

This training uses linguistic anthropology to lay out a clear framework of everyday bias. We will focus on three important components of speech-event analysis in order to unpack how bias is encoded. We will then examine the non-neutrality of language, and how it relates to the frequent gap between intent (good) and impact (not so good). And we will close with analysis and discussion of real-world examples of problematic interactions in academic workplaces.

About the speaker
Dr. Suzanne Wertheim is Founder and CEO of Worthwhile Research & Consulting. After getting her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Berkeley, she held faculty positions at Northwestern, University of Maryland, and UCLA. In 2011, she left the university system in order to apply her expertise to real-world problems. She now specializes in analyzing and fixing workplace culture, especially around issues of bias and communication.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Language Science Center, the NRT grant, and the Departments of Linguistics and Hearing & Speech Sciences and the Second Language Acquisition program from SLLC.