Brown Bag Seminar: Hearing What's Not Said and Missing What Is: Language and Race in Hyper-Racial America

During the past decade, Alim has conducted extensive analyses of the language practices of linguistically marginalized youth in "Sunnyside" -- a small "majority-minority" suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area of approximately 33,000 people, predominantly Black and Latino, with a significant population of Pacific Islanders. His study addresses two major "blind spots" in sociolinguistic and education literature: (1) the lack of contemporary sociolinguistic field studies on the language of African American students, and (2) ways to inform the development of educational pedagogy and practice that incorporate an accurate knowledge of African American students' language behavior. In particular, Alim has focused on "Black Language in White Public Space" - the ways in which institutional perceptions of "appropriate" language may actually hinder the most well-intentioned efforts to teach marginalized youth. In this seminar, Alim will offer pedagogical approaches to address these blind spots.

Alim is Associate Professor in Educational Linguistics and holds by-courtesy appointments in Anthropology and Linguistics. His research integrates linguistic analysis with ethnographic engagement in local communities, and includes the continuing ethnographic study of race, ethnicity, language, education, and power in "Sunnyside"; as well as ethnographic studies of the performance of race and ethnicity in various contexts, from the streets to school classrooms and playgrounds.

He is the author and editor most recently of, Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language; Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education and Social Change; Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture; and Tha Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness.