Tackling Linguistic Discrimination in UK Higher Education: A Collaborative Approach
Socio- and applied linguists have long been committed to critically exploring the role of language and communication in systems of structural inequality and social (in)justice (see inter alia Labov, 1972; and more recently, Piller, 2016; Baugh, 2018 Badwan, 2021). However, most of this research has considered these issues as 'real world' problems, addressing linguistic inequality in contexts such as the courtroom (e.g., Piller, 2016), professional interviews (e.g., Levon et al., 2022), and the school classroom (e.g., Cushing, 2021). In this talk, I argue that these issues are closer to home: Universities are complicit in the maintenance, circulation, and promotion of linguistic inequality (see also Levon, Sharma & Ilbury, 2022). I contend that, as educators, we not only have a duty to resolve these issues in our own classrooms, but – as professional linguists – we have the tools, knowledge, and approaches to be able to address these issues across institutions.
To do this, I will first reflect on the situation at my home institution – the University of Edinburgh – a university that is often labelled as an ‘elite university’, before introducing the student-staff collaborative project I have been leading with the 93% Club (a society for state-school educated students) and the Scottish Society (a society that promotes social mobility by supporting and advocating for Scottish students) for the past three years. I will provide an overview of our activities to date which focus on three main activities: i) student campaigns that combine lived-experiences of these issues with sociolinguistic evidence, ii) two large-scale events that bring together academic researchers, students, non-academic stakeholders, and media to raise awareness of these issues, and iii) workshops that provide explicit training in identifying and tackling accent bias and linguistic discrimination in the classroom.
The goal of my talk is to, ultimately, demonstrate that a collaborative enterprise between sociolinguists and student societies committed to addressing structural and social inequality can be a transformational force in addressing linguistic discrimination in higher education. We suggest that this approach can and should be adopted by professional linguists elsewhere in an attempt to tackle linguistic discrimination and accent bias at other institutions.