[Linganth] Linguistic Anthropology Lessons on Black Lives Matter and Police Violence

[Berman, Elise]

Dear all,

I teach at UNC Charlotte, around a mile away from where the man was
killed on Tuesday. I am teaching introduction to linguistic
anthropology this semester, and I planned the whole syllabus around
getting students to apply linguistic anthropological ideas (language
diversity, language and identity, language and power, ideologies,
etc.) by analyzing the language gap hypothesis. So I had planned to
spend a lot of time talking about the relationship between language
and inequality, but had not intended to explicitly connect these
discussions to police violence.

Now, however, I think I need to talk about police violence (and next
week, even though in the class we are still on language structure). I
was wondering if anyone had planned specific lessons on police
violence and black lives matter in linguistic anthropology classes and
would be willing to share what they did? There are obviously a lot of
different connections, but I am having some difficulty thinking about
how to incorporate them into the schedule/conceptual and skill
development activities that I had already planned.

Sincerely,
Elise

--
Elise Berman
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
UNC Charlotte
https://clas-pages.uncc.edu/elise-berman/