Moving Beyond Disciplinary Silos: A Critical Call for Black Linguistic Justice

Description

Please join the University Writing Program in hosting an evening with April Baker-Bell. There will be a pre-reception with refreshments starting at 5 p.m., followed by Baker-Bell's talk, Moving Beyond Disciplinary Silos: A Critical Call for Black Linguistic Justice, at 6 p.m.

This event is hosted by the University Writing Program, in collaboration with: Medicine, Science, and Humanities, the Center for Africana Studies, Public Health Studies (undergraduate), the Office of Inclusion, Diversity, Anti-Racism, & Equity via the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, JHU's the Common Question and The Writing Center.

April Baker-Bell is an award-winning transdisciplinary teacher-researcher-activist and associate professor of Language, Culture, and Justice in Education at the University of Michigan in the Marsal Family School of Education. Baker-Bell is an international leader in conversations on Black language education, and her research interrogates the intersections of Black language and literacies, anti-Black racism, and antiracist pedagogies. Her multi award-winning book, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, brings together theory, research, and practice to dismantle anti-Black linguistic racism (a term Baker-Bell coined) and white linguistic supremacy. The book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts, and it captures what antiracist Black language pedagogy looks like in community with Black youth.

Baker-Bell is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the AERA Division K's 2024 Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education Award, the 2023 Michigan Council of Teachers of English's Charles Carpenter Fries Award, the 2021 Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award, the 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's New Directions Fellowship, the 2021 Michigan State University's Community Engagement Scholarship Award and the 2021 Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Creative Activity, the 2020 NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, the 2020 Theory Into Practice Article of the Year Award, the 2019 Michigan State University Alumni Award for Innovation & Leadership in Teaching and Learning, the 2018 AERA Language and Social Processes Early Career Scholar Award, and many more.