36.426, Reviews: Inclusion in Linguistics: Lobina (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-426. Sat Feb 01 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.426, Reviews: Inclusion in Linguistics: Lobina (2025)

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Date: 01-Feb-2025
From: David James Lobina [dj.lobina at gmail.com]
Subject: Anthropological Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Lobina (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2271

Title: Inclusion in Linguistics
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/inclusion-in-linguistics-9780197755303?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Anne H. Anne Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, Mary
Bucholtz

Reviewer: David James Lobina

SUMMARY
The volume Inclusion in Linguistics showcases the work of over 40
authors across 20 chapters on what is perceived to be a lack of
inclusion in the field of linguistics, with North America as the main
focus of attention (with some exceptions). Edited by Anne H. Charity
Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, this collection of
papers is part of a project that includes the volume Decolonizing
Linguistics, also published by Oxford University Press. The overall
project started in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement and its
stated aim is to achieve equity and justice in linguistics on the
basis of race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, immigration
status, Indigeneity, and global geography (p. 2). As an instance of a
social justice endeavour, therefore, the contributions are mostly
focused on the sort of actions needed to achieve greater inclusivity
in the field, and in these very terms, the editors encourage readers
to use both volumes as guides for scholarly work as well as for
pedagogical purposes, with further material to be had on a dedicated
website.
I shall very briefly summarise each chapter in this section and will
engage with parts of the content in the Evaluation, below, where I
shall name the respective authors when pertinent to do so. The volume
itself is divided into 4 thematic parts. Part 1 focuses on
intersectional models of inclusion; Part 2 details possible
institutional pathways to achieve more inclusion in linguistics; Part
3 is devoted to some of the resources available to teachers and
lecturers to build more inclusive classrooms in schools and
universities; and Part 4 outlines various examples of inclusive public
engagement in the field. The background to the overall project is
chronicled in the book’s preface whilst the Introduction describes the
general approach as well as each contribution, with the Conclusion
highlighting the lessons learned.
Regarding the organisation of each chapter, most contributions follow
a similar template and are all equally short. The title page of each
chapter except one presents the pronouns the contributors would like
others to use when referring to them, whilst the actual issue at hand
is usually introduced within the context of the authors’
“positionalities” – viz., short biographical sketches of their
background and motivations – with most of the discussion typically
centred around various recommendations and action plans to increase
inclusivity.
Chapter 1 calls for a change in how linguists talk about the speech of
disabled people and argues that research on autism, in particular, is
based on artificially-constructed tests that have resulted in harmful
conclusions. Chapter 2 stresses the lack of deaf and/or black scholars
in sign language research, especially from the Global South. Chapter 3
argues that linguistics in general is hostile to people of Filipino
heritage, this partly due to the exoticisation and exploitation that
Filipinos suffer in North America. Chapter 4 focuses on the language
around transgender people and provides a number of examples of
perceived cases of transphobia. Chapter 5 describes the pernicious
effects of what it calls the figure of “the lone genius” in
linguistics, a variation of Great Man Theory, and among other things
argues in favour of citational justice as a way to elevate the work of
minoritised people (i.e., an increase in patterns of citations for the
work of minoritised people). Thus Part 1.
Chapter 6 starts off Part 2 by highlighting the experiences of
first-generation graduates – that is, the first person in their
immediate family to graduate from university – and argues for the need
of support structures for such first-generation students. Chapter 7
calls for the expansion of linguistic programmes in Historically Black
Colleges, and for a more expansive definition of what qualifies as
linguistics. Chapter 8 describes the state of linguistic research in
India, claims that it is too theory-focused, and suggests that the
interested scholars need to consider social aspects too. Chapter 9 is
devoted to Natural Language Processing research and the well-known
dataset biases that plague the development of language models,
offering some mitigating measures as a possible solution.
Chapter 10 kickstarts Part 3 with a call for linguistics to be part of
a social justice curriculum pivoting on antiracism. Chapter 11 reports
efforts to incorporate the teaching of Cape Verdean Creole in specific
bilingual settings in North America. Chapter 12 calls for linguistics
to act as a force for social change in community colleges, especially
in order to attract more people of colour to the field. Chapter 13
outlines one way to attract more students of colour: by using data and
examples from students’ own linguistic interactions. Chapter 14
explains the possible role of what the authors call land-based
knowledge in linguistics. Chapter 15 has some advice on how to conduct
“pronoun rounds”: a classroom exercise where students identify which
third-person pronouns they would like others to use when referring to
them. Chapter 16 exemplifies one way to make university lectures more
engaging by employing an “active learning pedagogy”. Chapter 17
describes a repository of open-access pedagogical tools to make
lectures more inclusive, including a database of diverse names for the
creation of more expansive linguistic examples.
Lastly, Chapter 18 offers some pointers on how to make linguistics
more approachable through public engagement. Chapter 19 argues for the
need to offer “critical language awareness” workshops to primary and
secondary students, as in a recent initiative in Boston. Chapter 20
discusses linguistic outreach programmes in relation to identity and
cultural issues. Thus Part 4, and the bulk of the volume.
EVALUATION
It is hard to believe that Oxford University Press has published this
volume under its Oxford Academy section. Inclusion in Linguistics is
mostly a product of political advocacy, not of scholarship, and whilst
this is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, the problem here is
that both the politics and the advocacy on display are highly
tendentious. The book is populated by myriad claims and denunciations;
and, even though most of these are rather contentious in nature, they
all go largely unargued for (in addition, some material is close to
mockery and even slander, and one has to wonder what OUP were
thinking. More about this below).
The book is also rather parochial in outlook; most of the arguments
and claims can only be understood within the context of certain social
and political undercurrents in North America, and there is furthermore
a fair amount of preaching to the already converted, this more clearly
in evidence when it comes to the significant amount of jargon the
reader encounters, which is rarely defined let alone explained – it is
instead simply assumed to be common currency, and moreover correct.
Much of the material in this volume will be largely incomprehensible
to most readers in Italy, Spain, and, to a lesser extent, the United
Kingdom--the three countries I know well-- partly because of the
language (also, the book alludes to social conditions that don’t
really translate to those three countries).
The general ethos is not a little partisan too: the preface denounces
the apparent fact that scholarship is dominated by white cis male
discourse, with the contributions meant to offer relevant
alternatives, as per the expectation that diversity (of race, gender,
ableness, etc.) produces different kinds of scholarship.Regarding the
mention of white cis male discourse, in particular, I must admit that
this claim did not elicit a belief that some perspective is sorely and
unjustifiably lacking in linguistics, but instead recalled,
unfortunately, past talk of “Jewish Physics,” – and, in the event, no
characterisation of what a white cis male discourse actually is was
forthcoming in either the preface or elsewhere in the volume
(incidentally, Jewishness makes one single, brief appearance in the
volume, if the search function of the Open Access pdf file is to be
trusted; the Press has not bothered to include an index in this
volume).
Moving on to the scholarship, the editors start off the volume by
explicitly rejecting some of what many would regard as basic tenets of
Wissenschaft – a German term that is more expansive than the English
word “science”, thus involving the human sciences, and meant to refer
to scientific fields that ‘involve rigorous and teachable methods for
investigating and acquiring knowledge about their subject matters’
(Leiter, 2024). In the Introduction to the volume, then, the editors
reject the notion that ‘research discovery and scholarly knowledge
must be personally distant or seemingly objective for the author to
have authority and expertise’, a position they claim constitutes a
case of colonialism and white supremacy (pp. 15-6), though no
explanation or justification is given for the sweeping statement.
Similar sentiments are expressed in many of the contributions, again
with little to no elaboration, and usually presented as simple
statements of fact. Readers who might view the editors’ position on
science and the systematic pursuit of knowledge as not a little
preposterous will be excused for quickly skimming through the book, or
giving it a pass altogether. More importantly, perhaps, such views can
have the unfortunate effect of antagonising those of us who might
otherwise be sympathetic to some issues from the volume, and who would
have welcomed more detail – and some argumentation.
Consider further examples from the actual contributors. Lynn Hou and
Kristian Ali, in Chapter 2, draw a sharp distinction between the
epistemologies of the Northern and Southern hemispheres, as per a
model of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, according to which academia from
the Global North is not to be deferred to and academia from the South
is to be privileged so that it can be liberated from the shackles of
the Global North (pp. 38-39). Julien De Jesus, in Chapter 3, casually
mentions that both the Philippines and the United States are false
countries and false nations, argues that the term “Filipino” needs to
be replaced by “Filipinx” by analogy to Latinx vis-à-vis Latino, and
takes it for granted that there is structural racism in linguistics
(p. 65). The terms Filipinx and Latinx are not common in the
Philippines and Latin America; they are the product of North American
politics and are not, in fact, universally accepted there, either.
Deandre Miles-Hercules (styled as deandre miles-hercules in the book),
in Chapter 4, assumes that a commitment to scholarship must entail a
principled investment in dismantling oppression. Rikker Dockum and
Caitlin M. Green, in Chapter 5, warn against the pernicious effects of
the figure of the lone genius and Great Man Theory, both of which are
‘mired in Western chauvinism, Eurocentrism, scientific racism, and
prejudiced language ideologies masquerading as objective facts’ (p.
100), and as such there is a need for reparations and restorative
justice (p. 105). Candice Y. Thornton, in Chapter 7, claims that
linguistic methodology as currently practiced results in data that
often perpetuate colonial hegemony. Emily M. Bender and Alvin Grissom
II, in Chapter 9, claim that large data sets as employed in
contemporary language models preserve systems of oppression, including
racism and misogyny, and thus are skewed towards hegemonic views (p.
206), a reflection of the coloniser’s mentality in the field of
Natural Language Processing (p. 212). Rhonda Chung and John Wayne N.
dela Cruz, in Chapter 14, describe modern Canada as a settler-colonial
state and refer to “raciolinguistics ideologies”, which are used to
justify and maintain monolingual, Eurocentric, and white supremacy
structures. Lal Zimman and Cedar Brown, in Chapter 15, have it that
academic freedom is a supposedly apolitical concept that is in fact
often mobilised to protect and sustain the influence of racist and
transphobic oppressive ideas (p. 314).
I really need to stress that the vast majority of these claims are not
defended or substantiated in any way in the book; they are mostly
presented as too obvious to require any elaboration, or indeed any
references, as support. Surprisingly for what is meant to be an
academic book, moreover, some material is rather unbecoming. Certain
admissions, in particular, come across as rather unedifying, and
reflective of personal grievances. Two examples will suffice here. Jon
Henner, in Chapter 1, recounts a chat with a group of women in
pre-flood New Orleans, at a time where Henner admits he ‘had more
patience for engaging in oral conversation with hearing people’ (p.
30), whilst De Jesus, from Chapter 3, devotes much of their
biographical sketch to listing many of the perceived slights received
in the past (macro/micro aggressions, in the parlance of the volume);
in neither case, however, do such admissions add anything to either
the arguments or the content of these chapters.
This is generally the case whenever authors’ “positionalities” are
shared in the volume; contrary to the overarching assumption in the
volume that one’s past history and personal motivations can explain
and affect scholarship, I perceived no direct relationship between the
biographies of each scholar and their academic views – what I did
perceive was SOME connection between these biographies and the
political beliefs and advocacy of the authors, though even here I
would not exaggerate the link, superficial as it is.
Worse still is Chapter 4, by miles-hercules. This chapter, as
previously mentioned, claims that a commitment to scholarship must
entail a principled investment in dismantling oppression;
miles-hercules also states that those academics who are not keen on
discussions or initiatives about inequality in higher education would
do well to ‘steer far clear of academic occupations’, perhaps to
dedicate themselves to veterinary acupuncture (p. 85; I fear this
alternative employment is not suggested in good faith, though).
Miles-hercules also claims, with no evidence, that the work of gender
critical feminists incites transphobia, and in the event refers to
these scholars as TERFs and FARTs (pp. 88-89), terms that by now are
often used as slurs, as seems to be the case here. One Ráhel Katalin
Turai, in particular, is effectively defamed as a transphobe for
having sent a critical email to miles-hercules on the occasion of a
past event. We are thankfully spared the actual contents of the email
and are offered paraphrases instead, interspersed with
miles-hercules’s rebuttals, but only because miles-hercules believes
(incorrectly) that emails are protected by intellectual property law
in the US and thus cannot be publicly disclosed.
It is certainly disappointing for an academic publisher such as Oxford
University Press to allow publication of such gratuitous attacks,
which certainly have no place in scholarly publications, and I am
surprised the legal team at the publisher’s UK headquarters did not
identify any potential legal issues.
Although there really is very little scholarship to discuss in the
volume, I will mention one issue below that is more or less academic
in nature in order to close this review with some comments about lost
opportunities.
I will not discuss, however, any of the recommendations on offer
regarding how to increase inclusion in linguistics (not even the “call
shit out” advice form Chapter 3), most of which have little to do with
academia and academics per se and more to do with society at large
(many recommendations, moreover, strike me as potentially negative and
against well-established, and well-justified, academic norms). This is
unsurprising, given that inclusion and diversity are societal issues
that require structural changes and government policy, and for which,
I would argue, the concept of class (and equality rather than equity)
would be the most important factor, and not the “identities” to do
with race, gender, etc., so obsessively emphasised in the book. (As an
aside, in the UK some of these identities are codified as “protected
characteristics” in the 2010 Equality Act as a guard against
discrimination, a nomenclature that strikes me as more apt; after all,
there is much more to the identity of a person than their race,
sexuality, etc.).
I should add that I find the kind of talk on inclusion and diversity
in the book surprisingly divisive, and furthermore surprising coming
from linguistics--divisive because the language around diversity is
often couched as if people of different characteristics lived in
different realities as somewhat “closed groups”, and surprising given
that linguists have often emphasised the theoretical validity of any
of the world’s languages to the enterprise of studying universal
properties of the language capacity.1
Regarding the limited scholarship present in this volume, then, the
book contains various criticisms of linguistics as a field that are
worth considering. Take Thornton’s contribution again, from Chapter 7.
In a passage in which Thornton discusses an article by Frederick
Newmeyer on the history of linguistics (cited therein), we are offered
this stream-of-consciousness reaction (I let others judge the tone):
"so he just gon’ act like Greek scholars ain’ learn from KmT?! Like
people of the African diaspora (pre and postcolonial contact) weren’t
exemplifying linguistics, philosophy, and rhetoric through diverse
oral traditions?! Like languages of the African diaspora ain’ been
explicitly articulatin’ and signifyin’ all the cosmologies,
epistemologies, and ontologies?!" (p. 155)
By “KmT”, I gather the author means the more common “kemet”, the term
Ancient Egyptians seem to have used to refer to the black soil around
the Nile Delta, though here it seems to be related to those strands of
Afrocentrism that use the term to refer to black Africa, as Thornton
appears to intend.
The criticism levied at Newmeyer misses the target, though, for
Newmeyer is talking about the origins of what may be termed
theoretical (or structural) linguistics, and that is not what Thornton
has in mind at all, as is clear from the quoted passage. Theoretical
linguistics is certainly not all there is to linguistics, moreover; I
myself studied at a department once regarded very much as one mostly
focused on theoretical linguistics (and on generative grammar to
boot), but there were also many courses in sociolinguistics,
historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and much else
(courses at the interface between linguistics and other fields, such
as literature, were also available). Linguistics writ large is, well,
a large field of study, and different aspects of language are studied
at different levels and with different methods. Interdisciplinary,
after all, is a reality of modern scholarship as much as the
well-cemented principle that subject matters need to be properly
delimited for scientific study (both points are of course rejected in
various places in the volume; Chapter 5 talks of disciplinary
divisions as false dichotomies, for instance). And, in any case, I
note that Oxford University Press classifies this volume under its
Sociolinguistics category, along with the related areas of Linguistic
Anthropology and Social Theory, so what is the issue exactly?
Thornton’s sentiment is echoed elsewhere in the book. In the context
of exclusion rather than inclusion, the editors mention that
‘[l]inguists who focus on the languaging of the mouth and its internal
and external movements do not consider themselves obligated to include
the languaging of the hands and the body’ (p. 10). Again – and taking
the term “languaging” to mean “use of language” for now (the term is
used over 40 times in the book, but receives no definition) – this is
not a situation I have encountered myself (and the editors offer no
examples); if anything, the addition of scholarship on sign language
as another window into the study of the capacity for language has been
very prominent in the field, along with many other sources of data
(experimental, historical, etc.).
All in all, it seems to me that the situation in this volume is as
follows: many of the authors do not seem to believe that their subject
matter or field of study is scientific or involves systematic
knowledge as these concepts are customarily understood (as
Wissenschaft), whilst some of the authors seem to confuse (or indeed
conflate) scientific study with political advocacy. If the former is
the case, then one needs to ignore the talk about positionality and
identities and instead just judge whether the knowledge on offer adds
to Wissenschaft or not, regardless of where it comes from. If the
latter is the case, though, one needs to recognise that political
advocacy is not Wissenschaft and advocacy need not always be the
concern of scholarship.
There are myriad examples of such conflations in the volume. Consider
miles-hercules again, who actually starts Chapter 4 by bringing up a
controversial post from the blog Language Log from 2017 involving
Geoffrey Pullum (miles-hercules also references, though obliquely,
another post involving Pullum which proved controversial too, this one
discussing the use and mention of the N-word, but this plays no role
in the chapter and I suspect it was added for effect). The post
miles-hercules focuses on has Pullum make a linguistic point about the
use of singular “they”, which at the time unfortunately degenerated
into a long discussion in the comments section on how the modern usage
of “they”, in the context of a person who identifies as bisexual and
wishes others to use “they” when referred to, ought to override a
person’s grammatical knowledge regarding which linguistic contexts the
word “they” can and cannot appear in, including which antecedents
“they” can and cannot take. Any argument to the contrary (or any
nuanced disagreement) gained Pullum and others little more than abuse
at the time – accusations of misgendering and transphobia abounded –
and this remains so now, with miles-hercules defaming Pullum in the
very same terms here. I should add that, for whatever reason, Pullum
stopped writing on Language Log soon after these controversies, and
this has been to everyone’s loss, in my opinion.
In any case, this is a reflection of the failure to distinguish
between political advocacy (or, in reality, the requests of particular
individuals as to how they would like to be referred to by others) and
actual theoretical points regarding the internalised and systematic
knowledge of language of a person – and, thus, constitutes an
unfortunate lapse into ideology.
I earlier alluded to lost opportunities. There was plenty of useful
information in the book as well as a number of interesting surveys and
interviews (though the samples were far too small for the conclusions
that are drawn from them), but most issues of relevance were treated
far too briefly and far too superficially. Some topics deserved more
thorough and sustained discussion – the history and current status of
Historically Black Colleges is a case in point – and a wide readership
would have been found for a more judicious book (and perhaps even an
international readership if the approach had not been so insular).
What we have instead is a book displaying incredibly tendentious and
parochial politics, poor scholarship, and an angry and divisive tone
throughout, resulting in an exhausting to read list of claims,
denunciations, grievances, and disqualifications. Most contributors
had, quite simply, an axe to grind here, but what they described in
their chapters was often more a case of how they would like the world
to be instead of what the world really is like.
The reader could have been spared some of the mockery and slander too
if the editors had not been so inflexible. In the Preface, we are told
that the project decided against a regular reviewing process for each
contribution because, of course, this is susceptible to colonisation
(p. xviii), opting instead for group workshops and revisions. It is
not unreasonable to believe that a regular reviewing process could at
least have avoided the worst excesses typical of political group
thinking. No doubt the editors view such a reviewing process as an
example of the gatekeeping ideologies they denounce in various places
in the book, ideologies that ‘rely upon assimilatory replication
models of academia that are grounded in and designed to maintain
white-supremacist, colonial, normatively embodied, abled, and cis
male-hegemonic views…[continues ad nauseum]’ (p. 444).
The volume could at least have been printed on recycled paper, but
alas, this was not to be.
____________________________
1 I have discussed universality, diversity, and language in Lobina
(2024a,b); the former is a blog post which argues that diversity needs
to be understood within the concept of universality; the latter
revisits the work of the anarchist thinker Rudolf Rocker and in so
doing includes discussion of national languages and standards, topics
touched upon in the volume too.
REFERENCES
Leiter, Brian (2024). The Professoriate’s Politics Problem. The
Chronicle of Higher Education, url:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-professoriates-politics-problem#leiter
Lobina, David J. (2024a). Universality over Diversity. 3 Quarks Daily,
url:
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/09/universality-over-diversity-or-rather-diversity-within-universality.html
Lobina, David J. (2024b). The Outsider in a Nation: Rudolf Rocker,
Nationalism, and Generative Linguistics. Studies in Ethnicity and
Nationalism, url:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sena.12450
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
David J. Lobina specialises in cognitive science tout court and that
is all you need to know.



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