Demystifying Language

Megan and Carrie talk to Dr Ayala Fader, professor of anthropology at Fordham University, and Dr Mike Mena, Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College, CUNY, about their new project, the Demystifying Language Project, where academics and high school students work together to rewrite linguistic articles into more accessible versions.

First article: Speech or Silence

Intro from our patron René:

• Barron's: MP makes her first speech in sign language
• Speech of the year

Chapters

• 4:59 Interview with Ayala and Mike

Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Megan Figueroa.: I'm Megan Figueroa.

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon.

Megan: I almost thought you forgot your name there for a second.

Carrie: Oh, there must be a lag.

Megan: Oh, is there a lag?

Carrie: There must be because it felt like you waited a long time to say your name too.

Megan: Oh, okay. Technology.

Carrie: Yeah, I know. It's so good and so frustrating in some cases.

Megan: It is. Yeah. And it's too bad that we can't do this in person, but...

Carrie: Yeah, it's true. But it would be very costly to be flying back and forth.

Megan: Yeah, wouldn't it?

Carrie: But this is good.

Megan: Costly on the environment and in our pocketbooks.

Carrie: Yes. So speaking of the environment.

Megan: Oh.

Carrie: This is from Baron's. This was sent to us by Renee. A German MP makes first address to chamber in sign language. So this was from October 10, 2024. But the reason why it's important now is because something happened this month with respect to this. But Haiki Hoback, a 44-year-old MP from the center left Social Democrats addressed climate change in a debate on urban planning entirely in in sign language. It doesn't say which sign language, but I assume there's a German sign language.

Megan: There must be.

Carrie: But yeah, so whatever sign language it is that is used in Germany, I assume that's what she was signing in. She said, "Climate change is unstoppable, but we must do our utmost to mitigate the effects of natural disasters and extreme weather."

Megan: Yes, absolutely.

Carrie: Yeah. So she was attacking the center right CDU opposition party, who in her words claim that, "more climate protection is a burden."

Megan: Oh, gosh.

Carrie: They are totally wrong. More climate protection will save lives and save money from the cost of natural catastrophes. The most expensive thing would be doing nothing.

Megan: She signed that.

Carrie: Yes.

Megan: Very cool.

Carrie: Yes. She assigned the equivalent of that. Yes. This all translated probably multiple times. Probably translated, well, first interpreted from the sign language into German and then translated from German into English.

Megan: Yes. Yeah. But you get the gist of it. That's really cool. Yeah. So this was the first time that's ever happened, that they've done it in sign. Someone has done.

Carrie: I don't know if that's true, however, what is the first is that this is the first speech of the year award.

Megan: Oh.

Carrie: So the award was just given out in December 12th, already of the year. 2024. I assume that means Speech of the Year was given to her for the speech. But that's what's definitely the first. I don't know if her giving the speech is a first.

Megan: Is it right for us to say giving a speech if it's in sign? I don't know.

Carrie: I don't know. The speech in this case is like the genre versus speech meaning modality. So I feel like because there is a metaphorical expansion there, I think it's okay.

Megan: Yeah. I don't know what else you would call it.

Carrie: Exactly. People can tell me I'm wrong. I'm open to listening, but there's just like so many metaphorical extensions of things that I'm like, it's tricky once you're talking about that. I don't know.

Megan: So I wonder if she got Speech of the Year because it was a combination of the actual content plus the fact that it was a sign.

Carrie: Maybe, I have no idea.

Megan: Because it sounded like she really got into it with them.

Carrie: Yeah. Sounded like a good speech.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: A heartfelt speech. And then the next speaker in the debate, Caren Lay from the far left Die Linke Party called her address, "a moving and historic moment."

Megan: Wow.

Carrie: So I think the content was at least a big part of why.

Megan: Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, very cool.

Carrie: Yeah. And just so everyone knows, she represents part of Bavaria which I have a friend who grew up there.

Megan: Oh, cool.

Carrie: And I visited her family home there, so I have a soft spot for that region. But anyway, today's episode is another good one. As they always are.

Megan: They always are. We get such good guests on this show.

Carrie: We definitely do. This is a guest that we've wanted to collaborate with or have on for a while, one of them anyway, so it's very exciting.

Megan: Yeah. So we hope you enjoy.

Carrie: Enjoy.

Megan: We're so excited today to have Dr. Ayala Fader, a professor of anthropology at Fordham University. Her areas of research include the anthropology of law, ethnographic methods and language and social justice. And we also have Dr. Mike Mena, who is a Mexican American researcher and assistant professor at Brooklyn College Uni. Mike focuses on the ideological perceptions of race and language, in the context of American education. Dr. Mena is also an academic YouTuber at the award-winning Social Life of Language. Fader is the founding director, and Mena is the co-director of the Demystifying Language Project, which works to make linguistic anthropology a social justice resource for public high schools. Thank you so much for being with us.

Ayala Fader: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Megan: I'm so excited about this. Mike, we've been in contact before, but like I've never met you over the virtual world. So it's really nice to meet you.

Mike Mena: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah. We're finally doing this. We've had ideas to do something around this.

Mike: Yeah. I feel like we've been crossing each other's paths adjacently with the media work, but we never quite actually intersected until today.

Carrie: Until today.

Megan: And for an exciting project.

Ayala: Yes.

Carrie: So please tell us what is the Demystifying Language Project?

Ayala: The Demystifying Language Project is both a social justice project and also a research project. So I'm a cultural and linguistic anthropologist. And for a long time I felt how ironic that all these linguistic anthropology articles about variation and intersectional inequalities that we teach our students actually were not accessible to people who it might really impact the most. So high school teachers and their students. And so I ran a pilot project in 2019 at Fordham, where we brought high school students from the Bronx and had them read, a bridge versions of classic linguistic anthropology articles and do field work. But what we discovered from that was that the articles were still too dense. They were really boring to the students. They didn't really speak to them. I thought maybe our first step in this fledgling project would be to get together a great group of people, and think about how we could produce something that high school students and their teachers would find relevant and interesting. So that's what we did.

Megan: Did you say that some of these articles are dense? They're dense for everyone.

Ayala: Yes. For us too. Jargon dense. Hard to figure out. And it's like the most important findings, not the most important, but such important findings about justice and yet so not accessible to people who really, I think would make a big difference to read them. I invited Mike and I invited linguistic anthropologist, Lynette Arnold and Britta Ingebretson, and Dr. Bambi Sheflin, a sociologist of education in my department, Johanna Quinn, and also a professor of education and justice, Justin Coles. Together, working with a high school teacher, we worked for about a year and a half. It was partly through COVID, to design a workshop that would bring together linguistic anthropologists and socio linguists who would work in a team of one high school student and one undergraduate. They would work together using Mike's concept of transposition to actually transpose a previously published piece into something that those two students would find relevant.

Megan: So Mike, can you tell us about transposition?

Mike: Yes, absolutely. This was, I guess, my main contribution to this whole experiment. Which I think the radical implications of have yet to be tapped into. And I think we're working to uncover these things. But a lot of it worked around this idea of transposition, which very bluntly, it's a musical metaphor. We think of transposition as, let's say, changing a piece for violin and transposing it into a piece for cello, for example, or a piece for flute. We were working with that metaphor. But I thought maybe what would be best is for me to explain it here, the way I explained it to the high school students. Because I actually think the transposed version, the definition is the best way to think about this idea of transposition. And one of the better ways to think about what we do at the DLP. So when we're in the workshop, it's my turn to somehow get this theoretical concept across to both the high school students and the professors that were there, transposing their pieces.

My idea is that you can speak at a certain register that will change the relationship between the speaker and the audience. So this is what I said to this audience. I said something like, "Hi everybody. So we're working here to transpose our work. And what does that mean? Imagine that our academic work is like old classical music. It's great and all, but it's super old fashioned, boring. And the only people that really think classical music is awesome are the ones that are already into it. But have you all ever heard of a piece of classical music turned into a heavy metal song, or a pop song, or a hip hop song or whatever?" And this is where students would start nodding like, "Oh yeah, yeah, we know what's going on here."

And then I'll go back in. Sounds pretty awesome. So this is what we're trying to do here. Can you help us take our original piece of classical music, our boring academic work, and with your help, can you help us turn it into an awesome pop song that most people would like. So that means we're trading in the boring violins and the tubas that we're going to use, electric guitars and drum sets. It means we're going to be trading out the big academic words for better words. And all that stuff that makes a good song a good song. But remember, you have to make the song good. And what makes a good song is the feels that a song brings you. So there's an X factor we're trying to capture. You guys are going to help us figure out that X factor, bring that X factor over to this new music, the better music that you guys are going to help us create. I said something like that.

Megan: I love it. You're a musician.

Mike: Yes. Absolutely.

Carrie: Yeah. Clearly.

Ayala: That transposition concept worked so beautifully with this other concept that Lynette Arnold brought to us, which was a accompaniment. Which is this central American social justice concept where everybody comes to a project, like a transformative, some project for social change, bringing their own forms of expertise. And so we had an orientation day for our undergrads and for the high school students. But when we were actually in the workshop, we said to them and to the authors who were there, the academics and the undergraduates, "You all have your own forms of expertise. Like high school students, you know what you like to read. You know what speaks to you." Because they were in these teams, your author needs your help and undergraduate, your author also needs your help. And so they were able to really work together on transposing in a way where we hope, and this is one of the whole philosophies of the DLP, we flatten some of those hierarchies, especially between academia and public schools and bring everyone together for these joint projects to make social change.

Megan: That sounds really amazing.

Carrie: I wish I could have been part of something like that.

Ayala: It was really intense. The workshop itself, and as Mike said, it was a real experiment. And we were also conducting ethnographic research while we were trying to keep all these balls in the air. And we didn't even think about like, oh, the room was super noisy with all of these small groups working together and we only have one room. We really learned a lot. We all want a chance to try another workshop so that we can get it more right. But it was a super moving experience actually, to get feedback from the authors and the students and just to see people working together like that. It was exciting.

Megan: What would you change if you did it second time?

Ayala: One of the things I will say is we didn't realize what a big challenge we were posing for our authors. We paid so much attention to the students. We were so worried that the high school students wouldn't feel comfortable. We did it at Fordham at Lincoln Center, that they wouldn't feel comfortable maybe on the campus and that they'd be intimidated. But in fact, we were asking so much of our authors to take a piece that they had already published and they felt was done, and to break it apart and choose one idea. This was part of what Mike was talking about with his transposition, changed a lot of the language, only support that one idea with one or two ethnographic examples. That was a lot. And it was really, I think, a much harder task than we had imagined. We had two parts of the day. On the first day, authors did elevator pitches with their revised pieces. I think we gave them 90 seconds. And on the second day, their student teams did the same elevator pitches of their authors for 90 seconds. We thought that would help them and they'd emerge with an outline. But it was a real challenge.

Mike: What we were asking professors to do, I think we underestimated this so much. Because even from what I knew from the ideas that I had walking in, I overplayed the idea that we needed to change the language itself. People became very fixated on what jargon to keep or whatever. Are there any pieces of jargon that are absolutely necessary that they must put in? It became a big conversation about that. Which is fine, but I think that's only half of the transposition idea. Unknowingly at the time, we were asking them to reimagine themselves as a different scholar, completely. Not an objective scholar writing in a journal that we expect to be as objective as possible. But we're asking him to write as if you're trying to make a connection with your reader. And that's a completely different way to write. And of course, all the authors were going to have trouble with this if they've never done it before. And I don't think we really considered what a difficult and challenging task that is because, sure, we're all good writers in the academic mode, right? But can we produce the rock song version of our academic article? That was much harder than we thought it was going to be.

Ayala: And you know what, Mike? I think one of the issues was we didn't really know what those rock song articles were supposed to even look like. Like was it about informality? Was it about no jargon? So we've been working over the past year and a half now with each author. Some of them are like, "It's taking a really long time." We asked them to do so many drafts because we were also trying to figure out, and their teams, their high school student and undergraduate continue to comment on so many of their drafts. But we have been finding a way to both acknowledge that different scholars are going to write in different kinds of ways and that's fine, but to have some definition of what a transposed piece might look like at the same time. because one of our authors was like, "I'm a second language speaker." Martha Sif Karrebaek who does, What's in your Lunchbox. She was like, "I don't see my voice anymore in this." We did a lot of copy editing and stuff like that, and we use you to address the reader. She's like, "This doesn't sound like me." So I felt like it was really important this has to work for you too. And another author also, Merav Shohet was like, "I don't write in this informal voice. I want to speak to my team of students, but I can do it in a way that's more formal but also transposed." So I think we didn't know, and we are figuring out now the range that transposed articles might incorporate.

Carrie: Well, you're creating a whole new genre. Of course, you don't know exactly what it's going to be until you get there. I love this. This is so fascinating.

Megan: Well, and it's so exciting. Carrie's right? You are doing a new genre here.

Ayala: Well, our goal really, our team goal is really to create a public linguistic anthropology. Because we hear a lot about public anthropology and there's language and social justice, which is an important part of linguistic anthropology. But that public scholarship is, I feel like less elaborated than it could be. And so yeah, we are trying.

Megan: I think a lot of us in the ivory tower are stuck in the ivory tower, like the, oh, stereotype goes. And there's just so much locked up in there that's actually really rich, and would be good for other people to have access to. So what type of information do you believe teachers and students should have access to?

Ayala: That's a great question. One of the things that I feel like is super central is what we put on our website. That it's an open educational resource that we have launched and are adding articles to this whole fall. But one of that is, the critique of public schooling is that standard language is the only language allowed, and it's seen as somehow better instead of what linguistic anthropologists and socio linguists know, rather than just the language of powerful people and institutions. And so we feel like if we could get that across, if we change from prescription to description, with teachers and students, what we're really hoping is that the three groups will be impacted. Meaning, teachers will come to recognize the linguistic resources that their students already have. In addition, that students will also come to appreciate their own skills and also have the critical tools to make those kinds of more meta, linguistic and political critiques of the system. And also that scholars will come and have more resources for writing to a different audience, which I really feel like is really our obligation as scholars today.

Mike: Yeah. And thinking about this idea of standard language ideology in schools, the assumed register that we always write in is supposedly standard. I think when we're doing something like this, where we're able to explain complex ideas using regular language, it proves that it's possible. Underneath the transposition idea is my personal language ideology, which is complex ideas do not require complex language. And it is possible to transpose these ideas into regular human language. And I do it on YouTube every single month. And large things having to do with semiotics and stuff like that. And I proved there every single month that it is possible. Now having these text versions of transposed articles that are explaining things that we assume only standard language can explain in a objective way, or in a deep and nuanced way, showing that regular everyday language can actually get these academic ideas across, I think is really important and really radical at the same time.

Carrie: Yeah. And it feels like it shouldn't be radical, but it definitely is.

Ayala: Exactly.

Carrie: Also, there's this idea that different languages, you can do more scientific things in versus others, and it's absolutely false. Tearing down this ideology I think will also help tear down that other one.

Ayala: Yes. And we are really using the idea of language ideology. We introduced that on, we have a short blurb on our website about how to approach these articles. This is our idea about what languages for high school students. One of that is seeing judgments about languages as proxies for judgments about people. I think that's a really powerful idea. That's the one thing I really hope my linguistic anthropology students can take away from their classes with. It's super powerful because it implies this whole political approach to language and power that I think is really often below the level of consciousness, and is often not taught in public schools.

Carrie: And I definitely think that that's where we should be at least starting, is high school at the very latest or not.

Ayala: I think there's linguistic efforts to get like AP linguistics, which are great, but I don't think it should be a treat or extracurricular. This seems foundational. And one of the things we're hoping to do in one of our teacher training workshops that we're planning now for the next summer, is how to have teachers not only engage with our website and do some of the reading, but also engage in their own ethnographic research on language. And then figure out how they can incorporate these short readings in their curricula. Because we're not saying, don't teach standard language or throw away your New York state curriculum. Obviously that's never going to happen except in private schools. But they could, like I'm working with one teacher in one of our partner schools, which is Harvard Collegiate downtown in New York City. And I was talking to her about how when she teaches Toni Morrison, maybe she wants to include one of our articles on African American language. And she was like, "Yeah, that could work." And so I think slowly integrating other ideas about language could be super productive for everybody.

Carrie: Absolutely. Do we adults in general underestimate high school students?

Mike: Oh my goodness.

Ayala: Yeah.

Mike: I'll jump in right here. For whatever reason, we believe that there is some gigantic leap in consciousness and leap in metacognitive ability from the three months, from graduating high school to college. We believe that before this freshman year in college, we can't actually teach anything complex in high school. And to prove the point even further, this idea, the jargon that we're very committed to as academics. There's this article by April Baker-Bell, in one of these articles, a student articulates from personal experience what structural racism is. And does he use the word structural racism? No, he didn't. But if I were to want an accurate definition or a good definition, I would much rather talk to this student that can articulate their experiences than somebody that can articulate a definition that they pull from a dictionary. It's little observations like this that I see, why are we underestimating high school students so badly? They can do it. They can do all of this stuff. I am a hundred percent positive.

Ayala: Yeah. And the ones who came to our workshop, Scott Storm, was our contact, our high school teacher. And we had a couple of kids from Bronxdale, also high school. And Grace White is the principal there. The students were, I guess in some ways self-selecting. They agreed to come. They were so impressive. They were so engaged. And I feel like I learned so much from working with them. I said we were taking field notes and asking them to take field notes also, so that we could study and do at the same time. Which was another part of the experiment that was very complicated. But a lot of them wrote in their field notes about the kinds of personal relationships. And Mike, you and Britta are working on an academic article on this, but the kinds of personal relationships that came out of the workshop that changed how they saw academia. So they kept talking about like my author, because they were the author they worked with, and how well their author took feedback and they were so proud of their author, but they were also talking...

Carrie: That's so cute.

Ayala: I know it was. But they were also talking about like, "I didn't know if I could do it, but I kept trying and some of the words were hard, but my author was telling me, yes, my point of view is important." And those kinds of social relationships, I was like, "Well, are they talking about ideologies of language?" It's like, maybe I'm a little too focused on that. So for me, working with high school students, it's like any field or it forces you to face your own assumptions and be flexible and say like, "Well, this is what they're taking from this. Maybe that's the way to get going."

Carrie: I love that so much. I really want to be a part of something like this. This is so cool.

Ayala: You can be. You can join us.

Carrie: I don't do linguistic anthropology, but it's really cool.

Mike: Right before coming on your show, I texted saying that I'm strangely nervous for this one. I didn't understand though because I've done a million of these kinds of things, Podcasts. But something was making me feel nervous about this one. I think I figured it out. I am wondering if this is just one of those really good ideas and I feel it deep down somewhere. Like when you're writing an article and you think you've got something good and you get that weird feeling like, "Oh, man, this is really going to hit." That feeling I get with this whole project that there is something here that can be pushed really far. I'm excited to see where this is going.

Carrie: Literally any academic field could do this.

Mike: Yes.

Ayala: Well, that's the thing. Actually in science education, they're way ahead of us. They do do that.

Carrie: They do.

Ayala: They're really good at that. And that's been some of our model for how to think about the kinds of writing and how to share ideas. Some of that science education has been super helpful for us. And so has some of the work on public anthropology, especially around ethnographic writing and collaborative ethnography. Like there are some really rich ideas that are going on in the field right now. I do want to say our co-directors are an interdisciplinary group, so you could join us.

Megan: Okay.

Ayala: So we have sociologists who study education and we have educators. We have four linguists anthropologists. But a lot of people who were at the workshop actually were applied linguists or socio linguists. So we're thinking broadly about people who study either the politics of language or language and power, as a rubric to be more inclusive. And I will say how much I've learned not only from the high school students, but from the teachers and from our undergrads, from our authors, but also from all of our co-directors. This has been a real model of collaboration that has been super moving. I don't know, to me, like Mike was saying.

Mike: We have some superstars that are contributing to this thing. I'm wondering, do you have the list of the authors? Maybe we can just run down who's coming up on the DLP website.

Megan: I think you have some of our former guests.

Ayala: I'm sure we do. We have Barbara Meek, who's writing about indigenous language in Peter Pan and in Disney World generally.

Megan: Cool.

Ayala: Television commercials and white supremacy from Shani Shankar, how kids learn to speak and act respectfully in Vietnam. That's Mirav Shohet. We also have a great piece by Cherise King on the George Zimmerman trial, the testimony on Spanish and English bilingualism in schools with Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores. Talk about healthy food in a Danish classroom by Martha Sif Karrebaek. Mixed immigrant status families and how kids use silence in public schools by Ariana Mangual Figueroa. Black on Black violence in schools. Crystal Smalls is writing that. They/them gender neutral pronouns and why those upset some people, Kirby Conrad. How people borrow the language or style of others to play with racial stereotypes like Asian boys who use African American language, Elen Chang. How language and communication can take on anti-Muslim racism, Mariam Durrani. And drawing on students' experiential expertise to create more meaningful learning in schools, which is Jennifer Delfino.

Megan: I think we're just going to have to steal your list of the people we haven't talked to yet.

Carrie: I know. Exactly.

Ayala: You should. And you don't even have to read their work. You can read it on our website.

Megan: Even better.

Ayala: We've all started using some of our articles. So far we've published one. We're going to publish probably one every other week for the rest of the fall. But we've started to use them in our own classrooms with our undergraduates. That's been really exciting. They're so easy to talk about. You don't have to break it down in the same way. So they really spark a lot of discussion.

Carrie: Yeah, I bet.

Megan: I read the speech or silence one that you have on your website right now and it's so beautiful. This is really compelling stuff that might have been lost to so many people if we didn't have something like this. So you all are doing such great work. And I wonder, what do you hope the high school students will do with the information they gain from the articles?

Ayala: That's an interesting question.

Mike: For me personally. I think what's interesting about this group in general, I think each of us have a different idea of where we want, and how we want these articles to be used or rewritten, transposed articles. For me, I am most interested in developing critical thinking skills.

Ayala: Yeah, me too.

Mike: To me, that is where I want these articles to be used for. Not necessarily to inspire students to go into linguistic anthropology.

Ayala: It would be nice, but...

Mike: And that might be an effect and that's cool, but that's not at the center of what I think I want to do. Do you feel differently?

Ayala: No, I feel exactly the same. The critical thinking part and the political consciousness, not that they don't already have one, but around language that I think is harder to develop. And yet it's so central to public education that I think it's really important to strip away and raise to the surface some of the things that you learn in graduate school and that you teach in your undergrad classes. Bringing language up from below the level of consciousness to show how key it is to political processes of reproducing inequalities, I would say. And I really want to use these articles, not only in the classroom, like in students' classrooms where teachers can use them, and hopefully where some of the interactions between students and teachers around language might actually shift. But I have very high hopes for ethnography and the feeling that everyone can benefit from doing that deep listening and observing.

And so one of the next workshops after the teacher's training one is a student workshop, like a college now program, which is like when kids go to a college class for half the semester in high school. But this would use our readings as a springboard and also have students go out and do ethnography on language in their own communities and in their peer groups. And I think that is part of developing the critical thinking that might not always happen in high school classrooms. Sometimes it does. But that hands-on. Also, again, hierarchy leveling where students are producing research, I think is really important where it's not a lot of social justice is like academics telling schools like, "Well, you can use these ideas from what we have." This is really like a multi-directional set of processes that we are hoping to put into place where, students are producing research, faculty are producing research, we're all learning from each other and creating different ways of thinking about language in different contexts.

Mike: Yeah. And just to build on that, I think this whole project really does fit into culturally sustaining pedagogies.

Ayala: Yes. We were very inspired.

Mike: There's so much emphasis on meta linguistic consciousness, and in all the versions of culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy. But we don't actually have resources that look like what we are producing. And so I feel like these resources, these transposed essays are going to fit perfectly into certain kinds of pedagogies. Translanguaging pedagogy, for example. We generally think of translanguaging pedagogy as code switching between two languages. When to me, translanguaging pedagogy is more about the free movement between repertoires, whether we're talking academic language, translanguaging with everyday language or a cultural language that the students happen to be speaking at the same time. I think adapting these new linguistic models in our pedagogical resources, I don't know. I have high hopes that maybe this will just reinforce the idea that we don't need to be writing at this huge abstract level all the time. And that maybe part of our job as academics is to inform the public.

Ayala: Yes. It keeps us relevant. What's the purpose otherwise?

Carrie: Also, we are creating a huge body of knowledge that is important and people should have access to that. Do you think that this project has taught you anything new about language and power?

Mike: Well, for me, I always suspected academic language and the figure of the professor. I always expected the ideologies around that figure to be very concrete when it comes to students, their perception of professors. But I didn't realize how strong it was until one of the students said, they were talking about their groups professor. He said something like, "I didn't know you guys were going to be so nice because really it's like you guys aren't even human." He wasn't saying it in a derogatory way. He was saying it in, we live in a different abstract space that is completely uninviting to someone like him. That's the message he was saying underneath that.

Ayala: Yes.

Mike: I knew it was there, that distance between scholar and student or author and reader. I knew that distance was there. I just didn't know it was that severe. It made me feel a certain way when I heard that student say that. Because in one way I was like, "Damn it, I knew it." And I took that. I've been thinking about that since the workshop. And the whole transposition idea is trying to think of a new relationship. Moving away from objective scholar and student to maybe a relationship between emergent scholars where, even the professor or the writer, the original author even they feel like they're learning from the student. And we got that sentiment over and over.

Ayala: Yes. So much. It's on our website. Jonathan Rosa has a great quote. We did a lot of interviews during and after with different participants and he said, "I felt like I was teaching and learning at the same time." Which is an amazing experience. I would say for me, what I learned about language is, I knew this before also, but really about the power of collaboration, collaborative work together. I couldn't have envisioned some of the ways that my ideas about linguistic anthropology would be taken up by so many of the different participants. That is one of the most exciting things really, that it's through the collaboration and the kinds of social relationships that you wouldn't ordinarily have that different kinds of critical thinking are possible about language.

Megan: This is so cool. I, like Carrie, wish I had something like this in high school to do. I feel like I would've gotten to my dream field of study sooner if I had something like this.

Ayala: No, that's true.

Megan: Well, I wonder if you have any final messages for our listeners.

Ayala: Well, we really need more money. Yeah.

Mike: That's real. That's real.

Ayala: We were really fortunate that the workshop was funded by the Wiener Grant Foundation for anthropological research and the Spencer Foundation and Fordham Grant. I'm in the middle of writing another Spencer Grant now and it's a lot of work. I'm writing it with two of our co-directors and we're writing grants and we hope that those fund us. But if there's any philanthropists out there who wants to make a donation, we'll take anything. Because We need to give honoraria to our participants. We need to pay our teachers, we have some afford of money now that we're going to pay two teachers, one from each of our partner schools to work with us on the teacher training workshop and probably teach it. We do have financial needs and anyone who wants to contribute, we'd really appreciate it.

Carrie: Maybe we have a wildly rich listener that we don't know about.

Ayala: Yeah.

Megan: Exactly.

Ayala: On our website, we have a donate button.

Carrie: Okay. So anybody can donate any amount.

Ayala: Absolutely.

Carrie: That's good to know.

Ayala: Or just come visit our website, which is demystifyinglanguage.fordham.edu.

Carrie: And we'll also put that in the listener notes as well.

Ayala: So sorry, what was your real question?

Carrie: What are your final thoughts that you want to leave our listeners with?

Ayala: I don't think it should be money. Although that is truly what we need right now. Because it's like more than a full-time job and we're all full-time faculty and it's really hard.

Mike: We underestimated the complexity, even the afterward part, the editing. Having a digital infrastructure and a way to contact authors. It was all figuring things out real time.

Ayala: We didn't even talk about this, but it took us a year to build the actual website. There was no website. So we worked with this great graphic designer, Lee Baron, as we were editing the articles and we all took a turn and read each article, and worked with a copy editor and multiple iterations. We were also building what the structure of the website would look like. So it took much longer and it grew faster than we expected also. Like we just thought, "Well, we'll do this workshop and then we'll be done." But it's like, "Oh. actually not. We could do much more." So it was both exciting and a little overwhelming.

Mike: And I guess my final thought would probably just be stay tuned because things are going to be coming out regularly.

Ayala: Yes.

Carrie: I do have another question. Are you writing an article about this whole process?

Ayala: Oh, yes. We forgot to tell you that. Yes.

Carrie: That's good.

Mike: Me and Britta are the ones that are, I guess taking the reins on the developing the transposition theory, which I've hinted at, has a lot of different moving parts and incorporating the linguistic anthropology, theory and really figuring out what the heck we were actually asking scholars to do for us. We're really trying to figure that out right now. That's our contribution from our side with the transposition article.

Ayala: And that's going to be a more academic piece. And then Lynette Arnold and I are working on a more public piece. We were so excited to be pitched to Sapiens.

Carrie: Oh, cool.

Ayala: I know, I'm a super fan of theirs. So we pitched to Sapiens and we got accepted. So we're writing a piece about the workshop, what it was like and what happened. And that's going to be, because it's a Sapiens audience is more like actually our DLP articles written for a public audience. But it is research and social justice projects. So we are constantly trying to both create these new kinds of interactive workshops on language as we're also ethnographically studying them.

Carrie: Yeah, it's a lot of moving parts.

Ayala: It's a lot of moving parts. And you have to have food for people, which is always annoying.

Carrie: Oh, yes. Food and coffee or whatever you give teenagers. I'm not sure.

Ayala: Yes. Especially teenagers.

Mike: Pizza. Just go pizza every time.

Ayala: And Halal guys, that was a big hit.

Carrie: Ooh yeah, we have those here actually. And it's good.

Ayala: Yeah.

Carrie: Thank you so, so much. This has been an excellent conversation.

Ayala: Good.

Mike: Absolutely.

Megan: Thank you for doing what you're doing.

Ayala: Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it. Always fun to talk with you, Mike.

Carrie: And we always leave our listeners with one final message. Don't be an asshole.

Carrie: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, the music by Nick Grana. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at Vocal Fries Pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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