[Linganth] Ling anthro research on language variation and ethnicity in tech?

[Nathaniel Dumas]

Good morning colleagues!

I hope all is well. I'm emailing to ask if anyone knows of any work that is
specific to the tech industry on language ideologies and their
intersections with race/ethnicity? I ask because I am about to start
working with a non-profit aimed at increasing African American
participation in tech, particularly to train critical user experience
researchers. Yet much of the work that is out there on speech events like
the 'user interview' and 'diary studies' do not take ethnicity and language
ideologies into account. Moreover, a majority of the work excludes and
omits much of the work done by critical native anthropologists who have
raised critiques of traditional anthropological methods that the tech
industry often uses in UX research without doing any critical appraises of
it that really challenge status quo ideologies.

Also, most of the work, except in the context of international user
experience research, assumes a cultural homogeneity within work in the US,
and has consequences for how persons of color who come from different
backgrounds may be evaluated as 'effective' and 'non-effective'
interviewers as tech begins to push for more people of color to be a part
of their teams without a critical understanding of all this entails. Of
course, I could point my colleagues to Charles Briggs' work, but tech
people, I've found, like to read things a bit more closely aligned to their
industry and it's a long hard battle since user experience research has had
a particular bent towards psychology/cognitive science.

That said, does anyone know of any linguistic anthropology work on this, or
graduate students currently working on this? I'd also like to use these
materials to start reshaping the diversity and inclusion training as well
at levels higher up, so if anyone has any best practices for that, that too
would be great.

Cheers,
Nate

-- 
Nathaniel Dumas
Research Associate, Department of Anthropology
University of Santa Cruz
nadumas at ucsc.edu
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