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Theresa Y. Austin, professor in the Language, Literacy and Culture program of the College of Education, and doctoral alumna Emma Britton recently co-authored a chapter in the edited volume, “Toward Abolishing White Supremacy on Campus.”

The book aims to allow higher education professionals to consider how their roles impact BIPOC students, faculty and staff. Through personal anecdotes, case studies, scholarly research and historical references, the latest volume in the “Equity in Higher Education Theory, Policy, and Praxis” series centers the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the academic community while offering tools toward abolishing white supremacy in higher education.

In their chapter, “Disrupting Symbolic Violence in Instructors’ Evaluative Practices with Critical Language Awareness,” Austin and Britton show how commonplace evaluations of students writing can unwittingly represent racialized responses which operationalize whiteness, as punitive evaluations can be experienced by language minoritized students as microaggressions – which slight an individual from a subordinated group, highlighting how the individual deviates from group norms.

The chapter asserts that instructors across the disciplines can disrupt racism through linguistically-just evaluative practices and address linguicism, or linguistic bias. To this end, it introduces instructors to critical language awareness (CLA) pedagogies, which raise consciousness about relationships among language, race, ideology and inequity, and considers ways that CLA can be implicated in the evaluative practices of instructors and in the revision processes of multilingual students.

“Toward Abolishing White Supremacy on Campus,” is available to purchase from publisher Peter Lang.