Last month, I had the opportunity to travel to San Diego for an NSF-funded workshop on inclusive language in the STEM disciplines. It was a wonderful trip mixing rhetoricians (you can see several of them hard at work if you look closely at the image below–John Lynch at the board, Raquel Robvais looking on from the side and Leah Ceccarelli looking on from the other side of the white board) with sociologists, environmental humanities scholars, medical doctors, and biologists.
We identified problematic and exclusive language in STEM, talked about alternatives and solutions, and mapped out a position paper to be completed over the next months. We also had quite a bit of fun having meals together, catching up with old friends (other rhetoricians there included Jordynn Jack, Kelly Happe, and John Jackson, Jr.) and meeting new ones. Here’s to an applied research trajectory that makes real change in the days and years to come!
