Guest speaker: Jeremy Calder (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Our departmental Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative is very pleased to be hosting a talk by Jeremy Calder (University of Colorado, Boulder); they are a faculty member in sociolinguistics working on language, gender and sexuality, marginalization, stylization, and sociophonetics. Their talk, "Moving beyond the white and cisgender speaking subject in variationist research," will be held online from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM, to be followed by a reception. Note that the talk will be recorded, and that access to the recording will be available on request; for further details, contact Nathan Sanders (faculty).

While the study of gender has largely concerned the practices of white, cisgender speakers in variationist sociolinguistic research, this talk encourages the field to consider a wider range of gendered perspectives, including non-white and non-cisgender ones, in order to facilitate epistemic justice (see also King 2020). An exploration of the realization of /s/ across multiple non-white and non-cisgender communities reveals that gendered linguistic patterns don’t always conform to those found among the white, cisgender subjects prevalent in previous research. In addition, I argue that the social interpretations of these patterns runs the risk of reifying problematic controlling images (Hill Collins 1986) about marginalized populations, if they aren’t grounded and contextualized within local epistemologies. A discussion of the patterns and epistemologies of various non-white and non-cisgender communities illuminates that indexicality is ditransitive - i.e., variables index particular subsets of social meanings for particular populations. In other words, the sociolinguistic epistemologies researchers have gained through studies of the majority population are not always adequate and accurate in explaining the patterns found in underrepresented and understudied communities. Local epistemologies should be considered in variationist analysis to ensure that the way we represent the sociolinguistic motivations behind particular linguistic patterns is epistemically just.