Raciolinguistic Justice & Writing Assessment   

edited by Shane A. Wood (University of Central Florida) and Emily K. Suh (Texas State University)  

This special issue extends the Journal of Writing Assessment’s engagement with justice-oriented approaches and practices of assessment (see special issue on Neurodivergence & Accessibility, 2025; Contract Grading, 2020). Building from the work of our recently published book, On Response: Raciolinguistic Justice and Responding to Student Writing (2026, published by WAC Clearinghouse), this special issue takes up raciolinguistic justice as a means to explore the relationship between race and language and its implications on pedagogy, praxis, and writing assessment (Howell et al., 2020; Suh et al., 2021). Raciolinguistic justice is a framework for “deep and ongoing contemplation” that interrogates how race and language are constructed together and mobilized to reproduce inequity within and beyond educational contexts. Raciolinguistically-just approaches embrace language difference as an asset, empower students’ voices and identities, resist standard language ideologies, and extend justice-oriented pedagogies and assessment practices. Raciolinguistic justice critically examines racialization (i.e., categorizing individuals or groups as holding a particular racial identity) as “a process of socialization in and through language… [and] a continuous project of becoming as opposed to being” (Alim, 2016). 

In “Exploring Fairness and Seeking Social Justice for Writing Assessment,” Brad Queen, Kate Kirby, Maryam Eslami, and Kameryn Denaro (2025) use culturally responsive models of writing assessment and antiracist methods to analyze ePortfolio assessment data as a means to “study the social construction of race/ethnicity and intersectionality through literacy and language assessment” (n.p.). Building on this and Mya Poe, Asao B. Inoue, and Norbert Elliot’s (2019) assertion that “writing assessment best serves students when justice is taken as the ultimate aim of assessment,” this special issue invites teacher-scholar-administrators to share how they’re advancing raciolinguistic justice while navigating cultural, institutional, programmatic, and classroom realities at the intersection of race, language, and writing assessment (5). We ask for contributors to share how they are adopting and advancing culturally responsive models of writing assessment through raciolinguistics. 

In particular, we invite contributors to consider the raciolinguistic perspective, which argues that the problem isn’t just that certain language varieties are devalued but that listeners/evaluators are racially positioned to hear language as deficient regardless of its actual features (Rosa and Flores, 2017). And we encourage contributions to consider the impacts of the “white gaze” not as a “biographical individual but as an ideological position and mode of perception that shapes our racialized society” (Flores and Rosa, 2015). Flores and Rosa pay attention to the listening subject because it “helps us understand how particular racialized people’s linguistic practices can be stigmatized regardless of whether they correspond to standard English" (n.p.). Evaluative tools and technologies can embody and enforce the white gaze, too.  

For example, Jeanne Sinclair (2025) analyzes the standardized high-stakes State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) reading test, tying the test to the “white listening subject.” Sinclair discusses the need to have a “robust critical theory that connects race/racism, language, and power” to understand consequences of assessment, and her research finds that the STAAR reading test is “Foucauldian in that it exerts power on the communities that are already marginalized, while higher-income, White communities are less affected” (13; 35). 

We seek contributions that take up this work and interrogate who is doing the assessing, from what racial and linguistic subject position, who does the student perceive the reader to be, and what is the assessment–and all the ideological assumptions baked in.  

Writing studies scholars and scholar-practitioners are among the most vocal in promoting more just pedagogies and perspectives, particularly in relation to language standardization and the role of race or perceived foreignness in determinations of language appropriateness (Canagarajah, 2013; Howell et al., 2020; Lee, 2017; Smitherman et al., 2003; Young and Martinez, 2011). As institutions of higher education adopt and embrace anti-DEI policies that work against the culturally and linguistically diverse students they serve, we invite contributors and readers to recommit to our equity values, to move “past the safe haven of performative allyship” and “to talk about how race becomes inextricably connected to language in postsecondary discussions about standard, academic, or edited language” (Suh et al. 6). 

Raciolinguistic justice offers nuance in understanding “how race and language are co-naturalized, or uncritically assumed to go together, and then used to maintain racist practices in educational systems” (Suh et al.). In this call, we invite contributors to share how raciolinguistic justice is centered through their pedagogy, praxis, and assessments, including how this complements and extends antiracist pedagogies, racial literacy, linguistic justice, critical language awareness, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. Suh and colleagues explain: 

Applied to college literacy and learning contexts, a raciolinguistics perspective explains how beliefs about race and language become a filter through which language use is heard and valued in classrooms, institutions, and society at large … a raciolinguistic framing asks us all to consider whether, when, and how certain language practices and forms are viewed as deviant even when they would be accepted or valued if demonstrated by white language producers.

In writing studies, Nicole Gonzales Howell, Kate Navickas, Rachel Shapiro, Shawna Shapiro, and Missy Watson may have been the first to use the term “raciolinguistic justice” in their 2020 Composition Forum piece reflecting upon their struggles putting their antiracist and linguistic justice values into practice. They use raciolinguistic justice to “represent [their] shared goal of subverting racism’s hold on language use in the classroom and beyond,” and they emphasize how a raciolinguistic perspective “acknowledges that when we deal with language, especially the policing of language, we’re dealing also with racialized issues” (n.p.). 

We argue that a raciolinguistic perspective takes us even further because the goal isn’t to “decide what racial categories correspond to which linguistic forms and varieties, but rather to interrogate and contest the power structures that organize the conaturalization of race and language” (Rosa and Flores 105). As Rosa and Flores explain, a raciolinguistic perspective takes a “critical examination of ideologies that frame the language practices of racialized communities as inherently deficient and in need of remediation” (106).

We invite contributors from all institutional types to consider the following questions in their proposals: 

• What does it mean to enact raciolinguistic justice through assessment (e.g., placement, transfer, classroom, program, large-scale)? 
• How are teachers and administrators centering raciolinguistic justice through writing assessment design and research methods? 
• How does raciolinguistic justice extend and complicate ongoing work in antiracist pedagogies, racial literacy, linguistic justice, critical language awareness, or culturally sustaining pedagogy?
• What culturally responsive models of assessment advance raciolinguistic justice? 
• How can raciolinguistic justice serve as a guiding framework to examine and disrupt writing assessments inside and outside classrooms? 
• How are federal mandates and policies, state-level politics, and local institutional contexts impacting raciolinguistic justice work through assessment?   

We hope these questions offer teacher-scholars a starting point for cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary conversations around raciolinguistic justice. We believe conversations on raciolinguistics and writing assessment bring together scholarship in writing studies, literacy studies, and developmental literacy. In writing studies, we see conversations that challenge us to examine race and racism and its connection to language use, encouraging administrators and teachers to resist dominant linguistic norms and conceptualizations of “error” and “correctness,” often tied to notions of standardized English. In literacy studies, we see research that traces how individuals use literacy to navigate, communicate, and resist power structures across contexts—school, home, community. In developmental literacy, we see threads of raciolinguistics in conversations around institutional and programmatic placement systems and programs, and through scholarship about asset-based frameworks for teaching and learning.

Through this special issue, we hope to communicate a need to see raciolinguistic justice not as a theory housed in a specific field but as a framework that can braid disciplinary insights into richer institutional, programmatic, and pedagogical writing assessment practices. Raciolinguistic justice invites us to consider how writing assessment—in all its forms and locations—can be a site for intersectional frameworks, critical self-reflexivity and listening, equity and fairness, and collaboration. 

Submission & Timeline 

Please submit a 300-400 word proposal to Shane A. Wood (shane.wood@ucf.edu) and Emily K. Suh (emily.suh@txstate.edu) by November 1, 2026. Please ensure you align with JWA policies throughout the writing process. Any human-subjects research must conform with IRB approval and submit documentation as requested by JWA. 

• Proposals due: November 1, 2026
• Notifications sent: December 1, 2026
• Initial draft due: March 15, 2027 
• Reviewer/editor feedback: September 2027
• Revisions due: December 2027 
• Publication: Spring 2028