In Brief: Guest lecturer David Embrick to discuss “Race, Power and Language”

Posted by Jayme Blaschke
Office of Media Relations
February 10, 2016

David G. Embrick, associate professor of sociology at Loyola University-Chicago, will present a guest lecture on “Race, Power and Language: The Symbolic Meanings of Epithets and Stereotypes in a Baked-Goods Workplace” February 18 at Texas State University.

The lecture will be at 10 a.m. in Flowers Hall, room 230. The event is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by the Center for Social Inquiry, the Department of Sociology, the Department of History, the School of Criminal Justice and the School of Social Work.

Embrick’s lecture will examine whether racial slurs and stereotypes applied to whites by nonwhites carry the same meanings or outcomes as they do when these roles are swapped. Relying on a mixed-methods approach to examine the contextual fluidities and nuances of racial discourse in a southwestern baked-goods workplace, he expands upon previous findings on how stereotypes and slurs maintain white supremacy in both material and symbolic ways, and how racism shapes gendered and classed dimensions of these terms.

Embrick received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2006.  He is a former American Sociological Association Minority Fellow and the past-president of the Southwestern Sociological Association.  In addition, Embrick serves as the editor-in-chief for Humanity & Society (the official journal of the Association for Humanist Society), founding co-editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the newest ASA sponsored journal of the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, and associate editor of Social Problems.