Addressing an overflow audience at a special plenary session held at the LSA's recent Annual Meeting, LSA President-Elect Penelope Eckert and Executive Committee member Sharon Inkelas led a panel on civility titled "Our Linguistics Community: Addressing Bias, Power Dynamics, Harassment." Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Anne Charity Hudley, Itamar Francez, Kristen Syrett, and Gregory Ward also presented and discussed issues such as Implicit bias; power dynamics; bullying vs. authentic criticism; and how to be an upstander (vs. silent bystander). The panelists presented the following topics:

  • Gregory Ward (Northwestern University), "Implicit Bias, Slurs, and the Use-Mention Distinction"
  • Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University), "Gendered Language Across Contexts: How to foster participation, level the playing field, and minimize gatekeeping"
  • Itamar Francez (University of Chicago),"Harrassment: What can we do at what level?"
  • Anne Charity Hudley (UC, Santa Barbara), "Power Dynamics in Linguistics: We can't eat prestige and won't eat crumbs"
  • Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (The Ohio State University), "Ready, Set, Go: Addressing bias in the moment"

All of the slides for presentations in this panel can be found here.

The panel was part of a larger discussion on the LSA's new Civility Initiative, which included the adoption of a civility policy and covered a large number of areas regarding discrimination and harrassment in linguistics and from the perspective of linguistuics. The discussion at this panel has also developed out of ongoing discussions and projects in the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics (COSWL), the Committe on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL), and the Ethics Committee.