Rethinking Language and Race: Clemons Investigates a New Linguistic Approach

by Randall Brown

An award from the Spencer Foundation supports Aris Clemons, assistant professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, in a project exploring a novel linguistic pedagogy for teaching Spanish and other languages.

The $70,000 grant funds research for Clemons’s project “US Black Vernacular Spanish(es): Toward a Hemispheric Black Language Pedagogy in Spanish World Language Classrooms” from September 2024 to August 2025. 

“The project will result in several publications, one book manuscript mapping US Black Spanish varieties and another set of articles theorizing specific pedagogies toward the teaching and validation of these language practices in US school systems,” said Clemons.

The award supports hiring undergraduate research assistants over the next two semesters and three research trips to conduct sociolinguistic interviews. It also offers professional development funds for teachers who are open to implementing a prepared curriculum focused on Black Spanish and then conduct interviews about the viability of Black Spanish for their classroom populations.

Clemons will attend three retreats through the program at which she will mentor graduate students, workshop her project, and learn about the top research currently happening within the field of education.

“This support—and the attendant feedback that I have already received—validates my research questions as important and necessary and provides me with the necessary community to complete it successfully,” she said.

For Clemons, the project asks new questions within a continuation of her ongoing research.

“Whereas my previous work focused on race making through linguistic practices, this project seeks to re-theorize the ways that we have thought about the intersections of language and race,” she said. “Importantly, the project seeks to disrupt previous knowledge in the field that focuses on language as particular linguistic forms and instead focuses on language as process—so that we can map linguistic processes onto several languages based on the sociohistoric aftermaths of events such as enslavement in the Americas or colonization writ large.”

Clemons uses phenomenological approaches to analyze interview and ethnographic observation data in this work.

“I will conduct a critical discourse analysis on the interview data, first to pull out interconnected themes between my participants,” she said. “Then a secondary analysis will apply a raciolinguistic lens to the data to see the ways that language and power interact to create Black linguistic identity and language practices. Finally, I will conduct a sociolinguistic analysis of salient sounds and structures that manifest during the interviews with US Black Spanish speakers.”

Clemons hopes a new understanding of a hemispheric Black language pedagogy (HBLP) could bring positive and effective changes to traditional language teaching methods.

“HBLP will provide students with histories that have been systematically removed from US curriculum and thus erased from the cultural imaginaries of American students,” she said. “US based students often assume US history as American history and thus lack knowledge about how these histories were co-constituted across the hemisphere. HBLP gifts this knowledge back to all students.”

HBLP also allows for linguistic variation as part of language teaching, allowing students to create their own linguistic identity while learning languages that are new to them. 

“They will come to understand that language is for communication and allows them to accomplish their own communicative goals within whatever context they decide to participate,” said Clemons.

The Spencer Foundation support also gives her the opportunity for mentorship from language and education scholars who have defined the field, building avenues for new understanding and connections.

“I will be able to work alongside a cohort of early career scholars to refine our work and thoughts,” said Clemons. “We will also be able to foster potential collaborations for future work.”

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