Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Mass Media Engagement: Implications for Sociolinguistic Justice

Abstract

This article describes the rise of Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) as an institutional designation within postsecondary education in the U.S. context, and outlines some of the language-based challenges U.S. Latinx students face on campus and in the home speech community. Engagement with the mass media through editorial writing and interviews in television, radio, and print formats is conceived of as a productive means of educating the public about HSIs and the language issues that contextualize the lives of the student bodies that attend them, combating misinformation about U.S. Latinx speech communities, and, more generally, for doing what Wolfram (2016) calls “public sociolinguistics education.” A model of mass media engagement is suggested, in which community-based sociolinguistic research is communicated by the researcher to press specialists at the university, who help place it with journalists, who then disseminate sociolinguistic knowledge to the general public. The effects of mass media engagement—including community involvement and the creation of sociolinguistic artifacts—are discussed, and practical advice for promoting sociolinguistic perspectives through mass media engagement is given.

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

“…A special issue of the Journal of English Linguistics edited by Mallinson and Charity Hudley (), for instance, brings together the work of linguists in various US institutions of higher education who are directly involved in projects addressing language‐related issues of social justice on university campuses, such as programs that promote success of underrepresented linguistic and racial minority students (Charity Hudley ), initiatives of peer education to inculcate greater awareness of linguistic diversity among the student population (Dunstan et al. ), and engagement with mass media to combat language ideologies that adversely affect the higher education experience of Latinx students (Carter ). For many UK‐based scholars, an important context for their work was the historical fourteen‐day strike of the University and College Union during February and March 2018, which was initiated against the proposed changes in the members’ pension plans but then quickly spread to a range of other issues engulfing the UK university system under neoliberalism, such as casualization of lecturers, rapidly rising student fees, and oppressive measures of accountability imposed upon teachers and researchers (Bergfeld ).…”