Linguistics Colloquia

A reminder that Dr. Jessi Grieser will be visiting us from the University of Michigan for the final colloquium of the year.  Her talk is titled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Gentrification" and you can find an abstract and bio attached to this email. The talk will take place Thursday, May 18 at 3:30pm in Rosenwald 301. 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Gentrification

In this talk, I'll discuss the Big-D discourses of gentrification and the ways they serve as a form of abstract liberalism to obscure the racialized nature of change. Drawing on ten years of sociolinguistic interview data from the neighborhood of Anacostia, in Washington, D.C., I'll demonstrate how the ways Anacostians talk about their space counters those Big-D discourses at the discourse level, at the narrative level, and at the morphosyntactic level in ways which serve to re-racialize the process of gentrification and strip the agency of outsiders to determine what constitutes "good change." I then back out to look at the bigger questions of the ways gentrification is considered an a-racialized process and how the residents' talk brings race to the forefront, rejecting the colorblind racism assumptions inherent in the abstract liberalism appeal.

Jessi Grieser is an associate professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. She researches discourse approaches to the linkages between language and race and place identities, African American Language, and language and gentrification, with side work in the discourse analysis of online speech, especially in fan communities. Her book The Black Side of the River: Race, Language and Belonging in Washington, D.C. was released by Georgetown University Press in 2022.