I’m honoured to have received the Linguistic Society of America’s Language, Linguistics, and the Public Award this year!
Here is the (lightly edited) text of the acceptance speech which I gave on January 13, 2021 at the virtual awards ceremony.
Thank you, and thank you all for being here.
I'd like to say a few words about why we have things like the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award.
I think most of us agree that we want to live in a world where people know what linguistics is and how it's relevant to their lives.
Where young people know what linguistics is BEFORE they happen to stumble into a linguistics class. Where senior people like administrators, and funding agencies, and governments are like "Oh yeah, linguistics! We want to help you do more of it!" Where you can say "I'm a linguist" at a party (in the future when we go to parties again) and not have someone reply "Wait, what is that?"
The public engagement that this award recognizes, and which it has recognized for the past several decades -- that's what gets us to the point where people recognize that linguistics is cool before they enter our departments and classrooms, even if they never enter our departments and classrooms.
But public engagement is also a lot of work -- writing a blog post, pitching an op ed, doing an interview on radio or a podcast, let alone setting up your whole own project -- these take time and effort. And we get tired.
Especially this year, we're. all. so. tired.
And one of the most tiring things is how the academic system isn't set up to reward this kind of public engagement work, even though its funding, its new students, its contribution to society in general -- that's all dependent on people communicating between the academy and the world outside it
So what I want to say is this. You may not be able to change your own incentives, you may not be able to change the fact that the people above you in the system might not recognize your public engagement work.
But what you can do, is change the incentives for the people coming up behind you. If you're in charge of students, you can make part of the work that they'd need to do for you, that you'd need to assess for them anyway, you could make some part of that re-explaining a core concept in lay terms, adding academic citations to Wikipedia, doing linguistic interviews with their local community and bringing back the findings in a relevant way.
If you're involved in hiring or tenure and promotion, you can decide to count public engagement work as actual work, you can choose to pick a candidate who writes articles and then also tells people about them over a candidate who has a few more publications but keeps them locked up out of sight in prestigious but closed-access journals.
If you're giving advice to people who are considering careers in linguistics, you can point to the good that they can do with a linguistics degree outside academia. You can stay in touch with your linguist friends and colleagues and alumni who go into industry so that there isn't just one kind of mentorship and networking that you know how to provide.
You can even change the incentives of people next to you by recognizing and supporting your peers who are doing public engagement projects -- and to that end, I'd like to thank Lauren Gawne, my collaborator on many of these projects, as well as all of the twitter and tumblr linguists who have been linguisting in public with me for these many years. One of the most rewarding parts of this job is getting to share your memes and jokes and creations, and feeling like introducing people to linguistics isn’t just teaching them about an academic field, it’s bringing them into a community.
This award is given to me, but it's not created by me. It was set up initially by linguists who were trying to change the incentive system, linguists who I may never even meet, and it’s continued every year by linguists who nominate other linguists for it as a way of trying to change the incentive system, by giving people a line on an academic CV, by making public linguistics more visible, by giving people like me the platform to make a speech like this. But the people who do this incentive shifting work in the background often don't get that sort of flashy recognition that they're advocating for on behalf of others. And this is true of all of the awards tonight, whether we're recognizing students, or community linguistics, or many other things.
I'm humbled that in a year where we all really had LOTS of other things to think about -- really, SO MANY other things to think about, even just to keep up basic functioning -- people still decided to keep these awards running. People still kept trying to build the future for linguistics that we all want to see, not just when we can finally see each other in person again and hug our friends at a future LSA, but long into the future.