Advocating navigating in the (non-)Academic landscape

In recent years, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has reinforced its commitment not only to serve as a venue for the dissemination of current research, but also as a site of professionalization and capacity building for linguists of a variety of career interests and trajectories. This paper represents a collaboration between two bodies within the LSA: the First-Generation Access and Equity Committee and the Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group. It collects together insights from a workshop on mentorship, advocacy, and navigation of landscapes both within academia (with a special emphasis on R1/R2 institutions and liberal arts colleges) and beyond academia (with a special emphasis on the informational interview, a named genre of interaction that is likely to be new to linguists from more academia-focused contexts). Although the workshop centered the perspectives and leadership of first-generation scholars, the demystification of the hidden curriculum—including the hidden and unstated expectations of faculty on and off the tenure track—pursued here will be broadly useful to all linguists, including continuing-generation scholars who wish to support first-generation scholars.