About
The ROLE Collective is a group of scholars working against harmful language beliefs in policy and practice.
ROLE stands for Reframing our Language Experience.
Our aim
Established by Dr. Savithry Namboodiripad and Dr. Ethan Kutlu in 2022, this cross-institutional transdisciplinary group seeks to work towards concrete policy changes in research by:
bringing together evidence that taking essentialist approaches to language enacts harm,
supporting each other to advocate for and implement policy changes across institutional and disciplinary spaces, and
demonstrating scholarly consensus within linguistics and language research.
We want to move towards changing assumptions about language and identity by changing how these assumptions are encoded in institutional policies and practices.
🧑🎓 Curious about who's in the community? Check out our members.
Our motivation
Who counts as a “native speaker” or “native signer” of a language?
We all have intuitions about what types of language experience, behavior, and identity might be relevant to categorize someone as being “native.” However, when we start digging deeper into how this term is applied, both within and outside of research contexts, confusing contradictions and pseudoscientific assumptions emerge.
How we categorize people and their language(s) can have serious ramifications, and it is long past time for language researchers to come together to advocate for more accurate, humane, and just characterizations.
📖 Continue reading our core statement for why this matters and what to do next.
Our Approach
Following Rickford & King (2016), Charity Hudley et al. (2020a), and also Charity Hudley et al. (2020b), we seek to focus our scholarly energies on enacting changes in the spaces where we have influence, and expanding our reach.
Inspired by the cross-institutional approach of ManyBabies, we find strength in collaboration, and know that a multi-pronged approach is necessary to enact structural and cultural change.
This group seeks to both:
produce works which can be categorized as scholarly in a traditional manner, and
create persuasive policy writings and support collaborators who are trying to make change in their own disciplinary and institutional spaces.
🏃Take action: Browse our resources for a variety of audiences.