 Our fourth presenter is Will Penman from the School of English, whose title is An Aspirational Rhetoric of Anti-Racism. This is to effectively explain research to a non-specialist audience. Presumably, you've all been persuaded that this is important. After all, our actions, including where we show up, are an articulation of our beliefs. So, can we act our way through language into stronger beliefs? Researchers would say this is counterintuitive, but I'd like to try it out for a minute by chanting together, okay? All lead, and you follow in red. We should explain research. Explain research. Explain research. Explain research. To non-experts. To non-experts. Imagine marching through Wean Hall and calling this out. The call itself, like right now, would make people vulnerable. Do they join in? Do they not? Either way, they're exposed. Their response makes their belief present and real. My dissertation examines a case where it's insufficient, or even hypocritical, to have a response that's merely internal. I'm talking about how we respond to America's legacy of systemic racism. In criminal justice, in housing, in wealth inequality, in education. It's insufficient to say, I believe that racial inequality exists and is bad. I'm working with a group of people who are asking what ways of talking, or communication structures, can bring this belief to life. I'm working with about 20 people from a mostly white church, and about 10 people from a mostly black church. Together, they have a farm where they grow vegetables, and then sell and donate them around the neighborhood. So we can really look up to this interracial, eco-friendly, community-driven effort. Over three years of ethnographic research, I found that call and response was one key language strategy that they used to bring their beliefs to life. For example, in their first inter-church meeting, they decided that the black participants should have the floor the whole time to tell their stories, and the white participants would be quiet as a way to model their listening and relationship that they wanted to have. Have you ever been invited to a meeting and then told not to talk? But they did it, and beforehand, they used call and response. You can see a sample of it here. Like the call and response we did, this articulates something that everybody already kind of wanted, but it makes them commit to it out loud. Do they really believe that they need to bring love, that they need to pardon or be pardoned? In the meeting, bringing love meant being silent as a small corrective to society's unequal racial treatment. Joining the call and response brought that belief to life and prepared them for the rest of the meeting. So, my argument based on observations like this is that call and response is a promising language strategy for building trust and bringing people together of different races. If we want to enact inclusive beliefs, then call and response is one concrete language strategy for doing that. Thank you.