SSP Forum [Virtual]: Anne Harper Charity Hudley & Jamaal Muwwakkil on "Talking College"

Monday, December 5, 2022
Zoom
Meeting by Zoom

Photo of Anne H. Charity Hudley

The
Symbolic Systems Forum
presents

Talking College: A Community-Based Language and Racial Identity Development Model for Black College Student Justice

Anne Harper Charity Hudley
Graduate School of Education
&
Jamaal Muwwakkil
Linguistics Department, University of California Santa Barbara

Monday, December 5, 2022
12:30-1:20 pm

Virtual event (Zoom)

ABSTRACT:

The Talking College Project is a Black student and Black studies-centered way to learn more about the particular linguistic choices of Black students while empowering them to be proud of their cultural and linguistic heritage. Students examine the role of language in the Black college experience and collect information from college students through interviews and ethnography. We value the perspectives of undergraduates from a range of disciplinary backgrounds as researchers, and we have a particular focus on how our findings can immediately improve their own educational and linguistic experiences.

One key question of The Talking College Project is: how does the acquisition of different varieties of Black language and culture overlap with identity development, particularly intersectional racial identity development?  To answer this question, we use a community-based participatory research methodology and conducted over 100 interviews with Black students at numerous Minority-Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges, and Predominantly White Universities across the U.S. We also conducted ethnographic research on over 10 college campuses.

In this talk, Charity Hudley presents themes and examples from the interviews that illustrate students' linguistic pathways, largely without direct sociolinguistic support that could help guide their decisions. She highlights findings from interviews with Black students to show how they make sense of their racial and linguistic development.

Muwwakil extends the Talking College model and demonstrates how the model manifests through the institutional, and linguistic socialization of Black undergraduates at Predominately White Institutions (PWIs). He contextualizes the PWI as a site of Black identity construction for Black college students and highlights institutional discourses that contribute to the Black imaginary in the higher education context. He shows how Black students who are subjected to racialized and racializing institutional discourses consequently adhere to an imagined and dissonant form of Blackness. This adherence to has implications for how students do Blackness in the formative context of undergraduate education.

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