Metapragmatic Distinctions and Discourses of Linguistic Sympathy in Courthouse Interpreting

by Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications

Lecture Humanities Virtual/Zoom Event

Mon, Feb 6, 2023

12 PM – 1 PM EST (GMT-5)

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Jessica López-Espino is a legal and linguistic anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research with Latinx parents in a California child welfare court and the attorneys, social workers, and judges working on processing their child custody and parental rights cases. In this talk, she draws on ethnographic research conducted in a California child welfare court with Spanish-dominant Latinx speakers navigating English-dominant court proceedings with state-certified Spanish language interpreters. She will discuss Spanish-dominant Latinx parents’ experiences of linguistic marginalization despite the provision of certified interpreters for on-the-record hearings and demonstrate how attorneys, judges and interpreters who are part of the regular working group in court express concerns about linguistic marginalization and mobilize metapragmatic distinctions and discourses of linguistic sympathy as an informal, social response to addressing particular instances of linguistic marginalization.

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Jessica Lopez-Espino

Jessica López-Espino is a legal and linguistic anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research with Latinx parents in a California child welfare court and the attorneys, social workers, and judges working on processing their child custody and parental rights cases. Her book in progress, Hearing Child Welfare: Ideologies of Latinx Parenthood in a California Juvenile Dependency Court, offers a rare view into the perspectives and narratives of Latinx parents participating in child welfare proceedings and the legal and linguistic practices that shape their ability to maintain or regain custody of their children. The book is based on qualitative research funded by the National Science Foundation. She was a recent fellow in Law and Inequality at the American Bar Foundation and is currently completing a UC President’s Postdoctoral fellowship at UC Irvine in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications (OWNER)

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