Goals we are working toward
Our lab is committed to directly addressing our role in perpetuating systemic racism and injustice in academia and in society in general. Members of our lab were involved in drafting the University of Oregon Linguistics Department’s Racial Justice Statement in spring of 2020. However, we recognize this is just the start of the important work that must follow. Below, we describe some of our current commitments to work in this area. We will update once per term on our progress so check out our blog (under “News” for updates). If you have ideas about other steps we as a lab could take, please reach out.
Lab Internal
We will work to make explicit (in our lab meetings, lab documents, and lab website) our language values (i.e., valuing language diversity).
We will reach out to other labs and speakers to ensure we are hearing a diversity of voices.
We will expand our recruitment efforts for undergraduate and graduate students.
For undergraduate students, we will reach out to other departments that have more diversity in their student populations than our department.
We will make clear that skills are trained in lab and are not required to apply for positions.
We will explicitly connect with faculty in other departments and at other institutions to make clear that our lab, our department, and linguistics as a whole are open to working with students from diverse populations.
We will seek out funding opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students from a diversity of sources to ensure students have the resources they need to conduct innovative research.
We will assess our lab climate annually, and will continue to update both this impact plan and our lab-internal plans to address concerns of the community.
Conducting Research
We will continue to expand our areas of research inquiry to include topics and concerns that are important to a variety of groups.
We will balance populations/areas of inquiry across studies. For example, if one experiment focuses on language learners and how to help them learn more efficiently, another experiment will focus on native speakers who communicate with those language learners, to ensure that even in our research, we balance the “communicative burden.”
We will take inventory of our studies, the questions, and the populations involved in these studies each term.
We will examine the use of labels for populations in our study and will continue to assess appropriate and accurate terms to discuss these populations in our work.
We will diversify the references we cite in our papers and will diversify the reading lists of our syllabi
Outreach
We will expand our outreach efforts to ensure that populations we work with and work for are included in these outreach efforts.
We will also work to educate student groups, faculty and staff on campus about issues of language diversity, language learning, and “anti-prescriptivist” realities of how language functions in our society.