Sharese King
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Linguistics
University of Chicago

Racialization as meaning-making: A multidisciplinary approach to race and language in the criminal legal system

Despite progress in contiguous fields like sociology and anthropology in complicating essentialist or static views of race, linguistics has lagged in our theorizing of race and language, with our statement on such just being released as recently as 2018. Drawing on theory from linguistic anthropology and African American Studies, I examine racialization as a semiotic and meaning-making process via my study of Black language production and its perception. Through a multidisciplinary approach drawing on discourse analytic, experimental, and computational methods, I illuminate how linguistic scholars can contribute to theorizations of race with a lens on courtroom language practices which reinforce several themes related to Black subjectivity including: Blackness as other; Race & place as unruly; and Black language as unclear, inarticulate, and incomprehensible. Exploring such themes provide opportunities to consider new places for examining sociolinguistic variation, as well as the intersubjective construction of the racialized other.