LING 472: Injustice Writeup Guidelines

Due Monday, April 11, 12:30pm, Dropbox,

Our society is plagued by injustices and a great number of these have to do with language. These injustices are complex are multicausal and they may present a lot of challenges in resolving them. To effectively address any unjust situation, we must first understand how that situation came to be and what other issues it is connected to.

For this class, you will be researching about an injustice and proposing an intervention. To make the paper manageable, you will complete this big project into 5 stages where you will be provided with feedback from me/your peers. The stages along with their deadlines are presented below:

Guidelines: Injustice Writeup

Now that you have selected your topic and have obtained feedback from me, you will be writing up the “injustice” portion of your paper.

Your write-up should include:

• 6-8 pages (1,500-2,000 words)
• Describe (in detail) the injustice that you have chosen to investigate about
• Address some background behind this injustice by tapping into at least 3 major points

(e.g., history, people, power structures, ideologies, etc.)

• Subsections addressing the different major points (you can divide this as you please)
• A separate section describing interventions that have been proposed or executed
• A list of cited sources should be placed at the end of your paper

Guiding questions for the Injustice Writeup paper:

HISTORY

• What is the history of this linguistic injustice?
• What legal/social decisions led to the current state of affairs? ï‚· How was the injustice changed or developed over time?

PEOPLE

• Who are the different groups of people involved in this injustice and what is their relationship to one another (although we are now covering race, an injustice could be linked to other issues such as indigenous languages, access to language, issues of “disability”, etc…)
• How do different groups of people think or talk about this issue? (e.g. linguists, the communities who are negatively affected by the issue, the dominant groups who benefit from and/or perpetuate the issue, various political groups, activists, general public, etc…)
• What languages/varieties are being affected / targeted here and how are they linked to the social groups you describe?

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

ï‚· What social structures and systems of power uphold this injustice? (social institutions;

e.g. schools, government; the legal system, belief systems, economic systems…)

LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES

• What languages ideologies are involved in this issue?
• How do these language ideologies intersect with other ideologies (gender normativities, folk race theory, social class, nation state, oralism, etc…) – This can include the ideologies Jane Hill discusses, but there will also be – as they always are – connected to other kinds of ideologies. You should try to figure out what underlying beliefs about language are held by various groups of people who are affected by or involved in this issue.

INTERVENTIONS

• Have there been, or are there current real-life interventions proposed or enacted to address this injustice (by linguists, activists, community organizers, general public, etc…Injustice Writeup).
• What have been the successes of the intervention?
• What have its pitfalls and roadblocks been?
• What work is left to do?
• What lessons have been learned about how best to address this issue or how to confront the ideologies that support it?

Citation guidelines

• Add a list of APA-formatted references, ordered alphabetically by author’s last name. Guidelines here.
• Direct quotes should be placed in quotation marks and cited with parenthetical citations (e.g. “quoted text” (Author 2007: 25).
• You should not cite me or the slides as your source, as I did not originally come up with the material for this class. Instead, you should mention the actual source from which this information is obtained.

** WARNING **

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as the intentional or unintentional acts of:

• Copying material off the internet, books or articles;
• “Patchworking” (copying material from multiple sources and piecing it together to form one document; note that it is NOT enough simply to put in parentheses where you obtained the material);
• Copying material from the PowerPoints;
• Sharing files with other individuals; and/or
• Handing in papers or work (1) you’ve done for other classes; or (2) you received from previous students or other individuals.

Injustice Writeup Rubric