WIP: Racialized Discourses in Engineering Education: What Can We Learn from Raciolinguistics to Inform Broadening Participation in Predominantly Latino/a/x Engineering Spaces?

This work in progress paper analyzes the ways in which raciolinguistics can help examine the racialized ideologies existing in engineering. In this paper, we describe how raciolinguistics contributes to the analysis of the predominant practices that emerge from the confluence of linguistic, discursive, and socialization processes that lead to racialized ideologies about what counts as engineering (knowledge), who belongs in engineering (kinship), and who does engineering (legitimization). We argue that the language, the practices, the labels, the words, even the discourse – the mix of all language itself – is one of the main systemic barriers that people encounter when entering higher education in general, let alone engineering. We also provide an exploration of the potential implications for this research in helping to broaden the participations BIPOC in engineering.