“Some may think that to affirm dialogue—the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world—is naively and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans.”
Allison Corbett is a Spanish-English interpreter, language justice practitioner, and oral historian based in New York City. Born and raised in Tidewater Virginia, Allison has been based in NYC since 2013. She has over 15 years of experience interpreting in settings ranging from hospitals as a Certified Healthcare Interpreter, to grassroots community meetings and workshops. In 2016, she created The Language of Justice, an oral history project to document the experiences of language workers. Allison’s work focuses on capacity-building to support institutions in serving and being led by multilingual communities and amplifying the wisdom of fellow language justice workers. In NYC she has worked with the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, the Department of Housing Preservation & Development, GrowNYC, North Star Fund and Columbia University, among others, and has consulted with the City of Los Angeles on Language Access implementation. She is currently the co-director of Colibrí Academy for HIV & Language Justice and is one half of the collaboration Circular, which creates work at the intersection of language justice and oral history.