Welcome
This ambitious project is aims at a better understanding of social oppression and its effects by examining two of its more intangible manifestations. Recent research in the science of teaching and learning, education, cognitive science, and philosophy have endeavored to better understand these phenomena abstractly and broadly construed. The presumption of this research however is that understanding this phenomena in their specificity will be far more illustrative about them as a category and about the associated cognitive elements of social oppression that are their source. To that end, the aim of this project is the collecting, cataloging, and contextualizing of stereotypes and slurs. The belief is that useful insights about stereotype threat, about microaggression, about related cognitive processes, and about social oppression will be revealed by a database so structured. The most ambitious aim of this project is to determine whether analyses of the detailed contexts in which various stereotypes and slurs arise will make possible real progress on the cognitive tendencies -- implicit associations, essentializing stereotypes -- that contribute to continued oppression of various groups despite explicit legal, political and moral commitments to the contrary.