Building collaborations and community
An eight-week program that runs from June 19 to Aug. 11, the BAD Lab summer internship provides a way for students to collaborate across universities to share research and build community within the realm of Black language and culture.
Charity Hudley started the program in 2018 when she was a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), before bringing it to Stanford two years ago.
“A major highlight of the program for me is the opportunity to give our graduate and undergraduate students the experience of being collaborators in research,” Charity Hudley said. “It’s been amazing seeing students writing, researching, and working on projects together during the summer, and even after the internship is done.”
The 2023 cohort includes postdoctoral and graduate mentors from linguistics and education programs at Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCSB. The interns are undergraduate students from Howard University, the University of Florida, William and Mary College, California State University, Knox College in Illinois, the University of Michigan, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, and Tougaloo College in Mississippi.
To increase access and equity among participants throughout the country, the program will be entirely virtual this summer, according to Charity Hudley.
“It’s really important for me to help students see how they can build community in their field,” she said. “As a researcher, you need to learn how to work with scholars from a large range of experiences. Making it virtual opens it up to students who may not be able to spend a full summer at Stanford.”
A broader lens for Black language research
Funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant that aims to increase diversity in the linguistic sciences through undergraduate research, the program provides paid research opportunities to both interns and mentors. Participants go on to create Black language-based research projects, some of which are later published and presented at conferences.
“These students showed us in their applications that they have the training, interest, and desire to pursue research careers, and that they’re motivated to fully take advantage of the research opportunities that we provide,” said Kahdeidra Martin, a GSE postdoctoral scholar who runs the program with Charity Hudley.
Previous iterations of the Summer BAD Lab Internship Program have contributed to Talking College: Making Space for Black Language Practices in Higher Education, a book authored by Charity Hudley and professors from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County and UCSB.
“The purpose of the NSF grant is to support undergraduate research over the summer, so that’s a big part of our work,” Charity Hudley said. “With more diverse researchers, we get the nuance that comes from learning about language when you have the lived experience of being in that community.”
The mentorship piece
Program mentors — there are five this year — are active members of the BAD Lab who are selected based on a demonstrated commitment to train students in culture-related research. Mentors and interns are paired based on mutual interest, an intern’s needs, and academic goals.
In previous years, pairs have worked on project topics that ranged from linguistic racism and bias in grammar to the language behind educational gag orders.
For the duration of the internship participants attend two courses per week, engage in one-on-one meetings with mentors, conduct independent research, and complete homework and weekly reflections outside of class.
“It’s been so great to see the program’s sustainability through the work being done,” Charity Hudley said. “I see this not just as an individual program, but as a structural program where people are creating this amazing network of Black scholars, mentors, and academic leaders.”
For Brooks, the program’s mentorship piece is what brought her back for a second round, this time as a mentor.
“One of the most important experiences for me last summer was that I saw how effective strong mentorship can be,” Brooks said. “I really want to try and emulate the people I learned the most from through the program and pass it on.”