How being intentional with your language can shift your thinking

Question:

I’ve heard that I’m not meant to use the word “stakeholder” anymore, because it has colonialist connotations. I’m struggling with this advice: “stakeholder” is a useful term for my research, and while I don’t want to offend people, I also don’t know of any other words that mean the same thing. Can I really not use “stakeholder” any longer? Even if I’m using this word to show that my research projects engage community members from the earliest stages of my process?

– Anonymous, Law Studies

Answer:

You’re right that some people are moving away from using the term “stakeholder,” and it’s for a few different reasons. As the Indigenous Corporate Training group has detailed (2018), in many contexts, Indigenous people aren’t mere “stake”-holders – they are “rights and title holders,” and so the term “stakeholder” misrepresents their legally enshrined status. In parallel, clinical health researcher Joshua Sharfstein notes that, in medicine, the use of the term “stakeholder” gives equal status to diverse interested parties, including in contexts in which equal status is inappropriate:

As a business term, “stakeholder” carries an assumption that all stakes have equivalent intrinsic merit. … The purpose of good health policy … is not to make the stakeholders happy. Instead, the purpose is to advance the health of the public at reasonable cost. … [I]n a world where everyone is a “stakeholder,” there is less room for the public interest (2016).

I also like Reed et al.’s helpful, nuanced discussion of the term’s connotations, noting both its connections to colonial land-grabs and also its “embeddedness within Western ways of knowing and being” (2024).

Because the issue with  “stakeholder” isn’t just that the term might “offend people,” dear letter-writer: it’s that the use of this language brings along with it a particular way of thinking about all the people who are interested in or affected by a particular outcome. It’s good that you’re engaging community members from the earliest stages of your process, but if you position all the people with whom you engage as having an equal claim to your topic of concern, you risk effacing distinctions between them while reinscribing Euro-Western ways of thinking about and relating to groups of people. “Stakeholder” problematically equates distinct groups of people, some of whose perspectives should be privileged over others.

To put it another way: it’s the very usefulness of the term that those who criticize it are calling into question – not its potential to offend.

To learn more about how researchers can rethink the language they use to better represent, engage with, and empower diverse communities, I spoke with Drs. Thokozani Kamwendo and D. Scott, co-instructors of the course Conscious and Inclusive Language in Academic Contexts, which launched this past May.

Inclusive language isn’t about banned words

Learning to use inclusive language consciously, says Dr. Kamwendo, isn’t about memorizing lists of verboten words: “it’s about understanding how your language might cause harm and working to prevent that harm from occurring.”

“Stakeholder” causes harm to Indigenous people when it effaces their rights, and it harms your research when people who are clued in disengage because they lose trust in you. When herpatologists use the term “lassoing” or electrical engineers use “main/subsidiary,” for the reasons I described back in 2022, they’re showing that they listen to and respect their colleagues’ perspectives. Being deliberate with your word choices is one way to put into action a belief that your colleagues’ voices belong in spaces – labs, classrooms, conference centres, fieldwork sites – from which they have been historically, and sometimes are still currently, excluded.

“It is not enough to just say the right words,” says Dr. Scott. “Using inclusive language consciously, intentionally, enables us to be the critical thinkers that we signed up to be.”

“When you focus on what you can’t say,” adds Dr. Kamwendo, “you’re positioning inclusive language as a narrowing, a closing in. I think the effect of inclusive language is the opposite: it widens your audience, your reach, even your perspective.”

Inclusive language is about acknowledging and making space for more diversity

So if you’re not memorizing lists of banned words, how might you go about being more careful and deliberate with your language choices? Dear letter-writer, you’re already on your way: you heard someone recommend that you reconsider using the word “stakeholder,” and you got curious. Continue to keep your ears and mind open.

Drs. Kamwendo and Scott recommend a few more first steps:

• Ask people how they want to be described. In our course, we spend a good bit of time on this – on why it’s important and how to go about it for individuals and for groups. But the very short version is: ask people what language you should use to talk about them.

• Ask yourself “who is my audience,” and then take a closer look to see what assumptions you hold about this potential audience. Are you assuming that they won’t share characteristics of the people you are writing or speaking about?

• Examine your writing to ensure you are giving the people involved in your research their full props – that they have agency. A great way to do this is to look at whether you are using passive or active voice.

For folks curious to learn more, Drs. Kamwendo and Scott have a free one-hour webinar “Conscious and Inclusive Language in Academic Contexts” coming up on Thursday, July 25, 2024, at 12 p.m. EST – learn more here.