Social Justice in Sociolinguistics... and triangles?

The Rickford reading was one of my favorites of the quarter. Rickford initially entered the sociolinguistics field with a young idealist's hunger for change in education. Academia began, for Rickford, not as a thought exercise, but a true applied discipline towards social change. But after years in the linguistics community, he began to see the short comings of himself in the context of academia- how he abandoned the causes he originally championed for a world of theory.

The failings of linguistics towards the African American community are manifold. First off, the representation of African Americans in the field of linguistics has been poor, which he attributes to poor representation in the teaching staff, as well as lacking recruiting. Also in studying AAVE, linguists have typically parsed data from a slice of the African American community, and represented it as the whole, in a way that reinforces male dominated stereotypes and contributes to the erasure of women. With all of the applications linguistics has to social justice, in terms of higher rates of sentencing in courts for African Americans, and the discrimination faced in hiring and in higher education, it seems that linguistics brings in serious new possibilities in the realm of social change, and has a lot more work to do in terms of execution. ILT in the UK was an interesting approach, and potentially a promising start towards increasing education and understanding across these linguistic boundaries. Rickford explains a few methods of starting to give back to the African American community, after years of mining data and experience for linguistic theories.

The problem he points to, however, is on a much greater scale than just linguistics. When I was in South Africa, we studied criticisms of academia in Cape Town, which has gained a lot of knowledge from sociological work in townships- studying people who live in the least well off places in Cape Town- and not doing much at all to give back to those communities. The social sciences on a whole must do a better job of understanding that other people's lives are not a 'thought exercise'. In losing sight of applications, academia steals from these communities without giving their fair share back, or even representing these minority groups properly in their institutions. It is a failure on the part of academia to think people can be a study, without willing consent. Even sitting in the cafe in Palo Alto, I felt a bit weird stealing people's words from them, mining this data for my own benefit without even asking for consent or offering compensation for what they unknowingly shared. Granted, most of the people I listened in on where more privileged or powerful in society than me, but I'm not sure if my lack of power truly makes it ok. That's what worries me about this sort of research, and this is what Rickford gets at when he urges sociolinguists to give back to the communities that have fueled students and teachers and the development of countless theories in sociolinguistics.

I am having trouble relating all of these deep reflections to the Lupyan reading. I found it very interesting, the discussion of concepts as context dependent, the recognition that language gives us ways to talk about things, but doesn't necessarily define our representations absent of context. I particularly liked the metaphor- "What is relevant about a piano in the context of playing one may not be relevant in the context of moving one (Tabossi & Johnson-Laird, 1980)." (Lupyan, 2015). However, I somewhat struggled with the abstract intellectual nature of this article, after a grounded discussion of ethics in sociolinguistics. While I find it interesting as a thought exercise, I am curious if it is just a philosophical article in nature, or whether this finding applies to human lives, not just the intellectual interests of cognitive scientists.