UW communication professor Ralina Joseph is an excellent listener. Through Interrupting Privilege, a program she launched in 2016, Joseph has listened to intergenerational conversations about race and privilege in settings from museums to lecture halls to beauty shops. And she has welcomed the community to listen and reflect with her though a process she refers to as radical listening.
“Our radical listening sessions are an opportunity to listen deeply, with the intent of hearing information in the ways the person sharing it wants it to be heard and not interpreting it through our own lenses,” says Joseph, Presidential Term Professor and director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE) in the UW College of Arts & Sciences, and associate dean of equity and justice in the UW Graduate School.
Interrupting Privilege, based in CCDE, leans into difficult discussions with the goal of better understanding and disrupting racism and other forms of inequality. Each year the program explores a different theme, from “Black in Seattle” to “Resilience Through Resistance,” using personal stories as the jumping off point for further discussion.
An exhibition about Interrupting Privilege, developed by UW graduate students working with CCDE, is on view at the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) through December 2024.
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