CHIA 2026 – Power, Privilege, and Prescriptivism

Thank you for attending the workshop at the California Healthcare Interpreting Association’s (CHIA) 2026 conference in San Francisco! Here you will be able to access the slides from the workshop as well as additional resources.

If you’ve attended the workshop and haven’t given feedback, make sure to do so!

Resources from the Workshop

• Privilege for Sale Activity from the Safe Zone Project
• [PDF] Making Change Happen: Advocacy & Citizen Participation: Chapter 3 – Power & Empowerment
  This is an excerpt from a report about a meeting of people engaged in advocacy and citizen participation efforts in countries all over the world. It contains many useful takeaways, but page 7 (what is labeled as page 45) talks about the expressions of power mentioned in the workshop: power over, power with, power to, power within.
  • Three Frameworks for Shifting Power for Greater Equity and Impact by Lori Bartczak (Community Wealth Partners)
    This article had a flow chart of the “expressions of power” and brought me to the aforementioned source (Making Change Happen Chapter 3). It’s a super rich article with lots of great information about power, ways we hold power, where power shows up in our lives, how we can leverage power for equity and justice, and stories of shifting power within organizations and communities.
• [Video] What is Power? | Michel Focault
  This video describes Michel Focault’s theory of power. While it’s more philosophical than what I was trying to focus on, it had some interesting points and gave me the idea for the “If you could wear anything you wanted to wear, what would you wear?” question!
  

Additional Resources

• [PDF] The Impact of Power Dynamics on Interpreter Decision-Making in High-Stakes Settings by Alexandra Luna
  A phenomenal paper on the intersection of power dynamics and interpreting. I highly suggest reading it!
• [Video] Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power (TED talk)
  While this video talks about civic power, I almost used his sources of power instead of French & Raven’s 6 sources of power! This is about 17 minutes long.
  • [Video] How to understand power – Eric Liu (TED ed)
    A condensed version (with animations!) of Eric Liu’s talk above.
• [Video] Black word of the Day: FINNA by Sunn m’Cheaux
  Sunn m’Cheaux is one of my favorite creators! In this video he breaks down the term “finna,” a common reduction in AAE (African American English) and how/why its use is stigmatized… despite such reductions being common in the English language in general.

Other Privilege Exercises

In creating the list of privileges used in this workshop, I adapted some of the privilege statements from other privilege activities listed below.

• [PDF] Privilege Walk Exercise (version 1 | version 2)
  • [Video] What is Privilege?
    This is a very powerful video that my colleague Xane of The Willow Tree Project introduced me to. In this video, there is a demonstration of a variation of the privilege walk exercise.
• [PDF] Privilege Beads