Centering social justice in speech and hearing acoustics pedagogy

Abstract

Science can be seen as a collaborative activity designed to help humans be better adapted to the world that we find ourselves in and that we and our ancestors created. It is imperative that all scientists, including acousticians, create knowledge that helps all human beings, which acknowledges salient characteristics of the worlds we find ourselves in, and which highlights the human-created features of those worlds. This talk opens the special session by talking about three issues. We argue that there is woefully poor representation of the speech, language, and hearing (SLH) of people of color and of other marginalized groups. Studies of the normative behaviors of human beings are based on a woefully small and unrepresentative subset of languages and speech communities. We must also grapple with the consequences of our fields’ historical focus on the normativity of different speech and hearing behaviors. This involves interrogating what broader social structures benefit from a focus on normativity and pathologization. We argue that our field should follow the lead of Plaut (2010, Psych. Inquiry) in understanding not just differences in acoustic communication across individuals and groups, but differences in the perception of differences in SLH ability.