Philosopher receives fellowship to study racism, linguistic communication
Andrea Pitts, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, has received a six-month Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the fellowship creates career development opportunities for selected faculty fellows with promising research projects. The program provides fellows with a six-month or one-year sabbatical stipend; a research, travel or publication stipend; mentoring; and participation in a late summer professional development retreat. The foundation awarded 33 fellowships this year.
With the fellowship, Pitts will work on a book project in fall 2018, analyzing structural racism and linguistic communication, including making a research trip to the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Archive at the University of Texas, Austin.
This work will draw upon a diverse array of thought while considering novel questions regarding language and race. Namely, Pitts traces the work of a number of philosophers, legal theorists, historians and sociologists who have sought to understand how linguistic communication can cause harm, such as through the study of hate speech, U.S. First Amendment rights and slurs. Additionally, Pitts’ research focuses specifically on how linguistic acts – or words that have performative force – can aid in resisting or even repairing social conflict and animosity.
“Within critical writings about race and racism, in particular, scholars have long analyzed the means whereby linguistic communication has been used both as a tool for domination and as a tool for liberation,” Pitts wrote. “Drawing from these diverse literatures, my book project is an attempt to bring philosophical studies of language into conversation with critical studies of race and racial identities.”
Pitts’ research interests include social epistemology, critical philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, Latin American and U.S. Latinx philosophy and critical prison studies.
Administered at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation since 2001, the Career Enhancement Fellowship has supported 400 junior faculty members during the past 18 years. The program seeks particularly to increase the presence of junior faculty members who are underrepresented in their fields, as well as other faculty members committed to eradicating racial disparities in core fields in the arts and humanities.