Race Talk in Institutional Settings

Race Talk in Institutional Settings by Natasha Shrikant and Francesca A. Williamson offers a valuable way to understand and analyze race-linked issues in social life. As the authors show in their opening chapters, the dominant ways race, and especially racism, has been conceptualized in the academy is either psychologically, by locating trouble in the prejudiced minds of individuals, or sociologically, in which structures of inequality are baked into the social world therein delivering a myriad of advantages to whites. Psychological and sociological views are important and useful views, Shrikant and Williamson argue, but these approaches leave unexplained how race is instantiated in social interaction and what racism looks like in talk. To understand how race and racism are manifested communicatively, a language and social interaction (LSI) perspective is needed.

The LSI landscape is a complex one that can be mapped in a variety of ways. Shrikant and Williamson’s overview is a clear, compelling, and interesting one that furnishes a great way to distinguish among six different LSI approaches to analyzing race talk. Not only are nice explanations of each approach given, but a published study using that approach is unpacked. This “explain and then illustrate” combination is a particularly useful feature of the book as it offers students and scholars new to LSI studies of race useful models for developing their own research projects.

In addition to overviewing the different approaches to studying race talk, the book includes two chapters that offer developed examples about how each author has studied a particular institutional setting. Chapter 5 works through how Shrikant has studied online disinformation directed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Chapter 6 illustrates how Williamson has investigated racialization in pediatric encounters, including how healthcare providers resist treating Black children in the passive, non-agentive way prior research had uncovered. Most race talk research has focused on how racism is done. These two in-depth examples make visible how to study race talk that is not racist talk. Illustrated in these chapters is the subtle way race manifests itself in institutional interaction.

In overviewing ways to study race (racialization, racism) as well as the different LSI approaches, it is all too easy to write in subtly derogatory ways about approaches that are different from ones an author most favors. Shrikant and Williamson avoid this. Their book showcases a not well-known approach for studying issues of race, explicating how to use the tools this approach entails, without implying that more visible perspectives are problematic. Their book also presents each of the LSI approaches in a manner that a LSI researcher affiliated with a particular approach will feel understood.

Shrikant and Williamson give us a wonderful text. I predict that Race Talk in Institutional Settings will find itself adopted in a variety of courses including classes about race/racism, qualitative methodologies, LSI overviews, and organizational/institutional analysis. It is also a useful read for any researcher who wants to begin investigating race or racism in organizational life.

Karen Tracy, Professor Emeritus

University of Colorado Boulder

Dear Reader,

Our path in writing this book was shaped by our own research trajectories—where we share an interest in deepening knowledge about how to conduct race-related analyses in the field of Language and Social Interaction (LSI)—and by surrounding sociopolitical circumstances. We (the co-authors) met in 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and a global racial reckoning, which saw unprecedented numbers of people protesting in the streets. During the past five years, commitments to racial justice motivated renewed interest in race in academia and industry. Currently, in October 2025, the United States is once again in the midst of sociopolitical chaos, old and new forms, all of which are shaping the discourse surrounding race and racism. Since 2020, LSI scholars began informal networks among scholars with established and new interests in interrogating and extending the field’s contribution to race scholarship. We attended numerous online working groups, data sessions, and book clubs focused on unearthing the historical and emerging LSI works on race across disciplines. Although interest in race is rapidly gaining traction, the field does not yet have a curated conversation or research agenda for research on race and racism from an LSI perspective.

Following Toni Morrison’s wisdom, we wrote this book because it is what we wanted to read as early career researchers interested in race, language, and institutional life. As students, we learned to borrow from different disciplines, theories, and approaches to race—often largely disconnected from language and interaction—to figure out how to use LSI for our work on racial phenomena. Traveling across disciplines illuminated both potential tensions and opportunities to build upon and, at times, unsettle mainstream approaches to race and racism research. This book is an attempt to engage those tensions directly, while also showing the potential benefits and distinct challenges. We also found value in thinking across disciplines and connecting with researchers who would not otherwise use an LSI perspective to study race. Beyond speaking to the LSI community, we wrote this book to open up scholarly dialogue across communication and other social science fields interested in race.

Thus, our writing process was informed by our commitment to community as central to the development and circulation of knowledge. We began by intentionally forming a community of two with one another. We met weekly, not necessarily to write, but to talk through ideas and get to know one another’s areas of expertise and ways of thinking. Once we settled on a shape for the book, we started presenting initial ideas and sharing rough drafts of chapters with students, peers, and colleagues in various disciplines. We incorporated feedback from these interactions and also worked with librarians to supplement our literature search. Oftentimes, a completed book seems like the product of solely the author(s). We wanted to note that this book, like every other, would not be what it is without the contributions of a broader community of scholars.

Our aims in writing this book were twofold: to craft a central resource for finding LSI race scholarship and to create a pedagogical text that welcomes new and established LSI scholars to what we are calling the “race talk” subdiscipline of LSI research. In doing so, we seek to expand the community of scholars with similar interests and thereby push the fields’ boundaries. Throughout the book, we elected not to take a prescriptive orientation. We would argue that there is no one “right” way to study race talk. We do not assume that we have all the answers nor the best ones. Instead, we offer example questions and considerations for researchers to take seriously when studying race talk. We also name tensions in conducting research on race and racism from an LSI perspective and encourage readers to engage with these tensions, make their choices explicit, and see the kinds of curiosity that can be sparked in the process. Finally, we imagine possibilities—for research, for community, for anti-racism—instead of focusing (solely) on critique. Indeed, building is more challenging than tearing things apart and, we would argue, more generative.

Overall, writing this book has been wonderful, stressful, exciting, grating, and overall incredibly intellectually stimulating. We have grown through the writing and thinking process and are hoping that reading and engaging with our book is equally fruitful. We look forward to future conversations and community.

Respectfully yours,

NS/FW

“One important lesson made clear here is that most scholars are far more productive when they work with others rather than alone, sharing ideas prior to publication rather than only after, pushing one another to achieve new insights.”