Tazin speaks at Talent Day, Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement

Every year, the Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement in Sydney, Australia hosts an event called ‘Talent Day’ to acknowledge the achievements of primary and high school students in the Australian-Bangladeshi community. How does this interest a sociolinguist?

In so many ways – the interaction of multiple languages, the code-switching in the speeches, the expressions of heritage and identity in language use, the living examples of language shift through generations of migrants and so much more.

This year, though, my attention was taken by a request to give a short guest speech to the HSC graduates about to embark on their university journeys. My first dilemma was determining what meaningful contribution, as a second year PhD student, I could make. Which part of my university experience could I share? I decided to talk about my PhD supervisors and share two experiences that, for me, underlined the significance of language itself.

I told them about the lecture that Dr. Loy Lising delivers on the first day of class for our students. In the process of introducing me and the other members of the teaching team, she brings up the slide about communicating with us. But before the technical details, she implores the students to remember our common humanity when communicating with teachers. She explains that the use of our shared courtesies, such as “Dear [teacher’s name]”, “could you”, “thank you” acknowledge that a student and a teacher are two human beings communicating with one another.

From Dr. Lising’s words, I extrapolated that approaching someone more learned with humility confers dignity to both the teacher and the student and if anything, reminds one of the humility that should be cultivated in the pursuit of learning.

I then spoke about my first time as a student of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, when I was doing my Masters of Applied Linguistics. It was time for the final assignment and before giving us the details, she displayed an image of a Persian rug. She directed us to the intricate parts that were woven, bit by bit, to produce something so beautiful.

Her next request was for us to write her a “beautiful” assignment. To achieve this, she asked us to remember the great privilege of higher education, which so many others have been and continue to be deprived of. We were reminded of our moral obligation to use our learning to contribute to society and the first step was to dedicate our attention to writing a good assignment – to remember the privilege of being able to write one.

I had never had an assignment presented quite like this before!

Conceptualising and expressing the act of learning as a privilege and the production of work as beautiful was yet another exercise in humility, a reminder of the very significant role that our teachers play in shaping our minds, and an acknowledgement of the purpose of higher education.

Towards the end of my speech, I realised I had given the students a series of stories and I wanted to explain why I had done this.

To be meaningful, university and higher education must be a journey of purpose, guided by our teachers and mentors who nurture our potential to contribute to the world. Ultimately, the university journey symbolises the lifelong commitment to learning from those who are more learned and passing it on to those that follow.

Dr Agnes Bodis with her supervisors on graduation day

Congratulations to Dr Agnes Bodis and Dr Liesa Rühlmann, who both recently graduated from their PhDs!

The PhD research by both researchers was significantly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which makes their achievement all the more impressive.

Multilingual students at monolingual universities

Agnes undertook a PhD by publication to investigate language ideological debates about international students in Australia. Her research was supervised by Ingrid Piller and Phil Chappell.

Agnes now works as lecturer in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University.

“Multilingual students at monolingual universities” explores the discursive construction of English language proficiency (ELP) and multilingualism in the context of Australian higher education. The shift to a marketized higher educational model has brought an increased number of international students to Australian universities, resulting in several tensions. Most prominent among these is the ‘English problem’, namely the widely discussed claim that international students’ ELP is too low to cope with their academic workloads and, after graduation, with the professional requirements of their work. Therefore, language ideological debates related to international students constitute a prominent site where interrelated conflicts about academic commodification and national identity play out.

The thesis approaches the research problem through a series of critical multimodal discourse analytic studies of mainstream and social media discussions of international students’ ELP, university ELP admission requirements, and interviews with, and observations of, English language teaching professionals.

Dr Liesa Rühlmann after her thesis defense with her Hamburg supervisor, Prof Drorit Lengyel

Overall, the study finds that ELP is highly simplified in both public discussions and institutional communication. Furthermore, ELP levels are attached to specific student cohorts as a permanent quality. The responsibility for low ELP and its negative consequences is consistently assigned to international students themselves. This casts international students in a perpetual deficit view, particularly as their multilingual skills are either erased altogether or, where they appear, depicted as devious.

The study shows that public discourse and institutional communication are interlinked. This points to the need to ensure more responsible and realistic representations of ELP both in public and institutional communication as well as shifting the focus from language as a deficit view to fostering inclusive practices for a greater appreciation of linguistic diversity.

Race, Language, and Subjectivation

Liesa undertook a joint PhD across Hamburg University and Macquarie University to pursue a raciolinguistic perspective on schooling experiences in Germany. Her research was supervised by Drorit Lengyel and Ingrid Piller.

Liesa now works as a postdoc on a project related to migration and racism at Bielefeld University.

Dr Liesa Rühlmann celebrates after her thesis defense

In her retrospective interview study, Liesa focused on language use as experienced and reflected upon by plurilingual former students who attended school in Germany. In particular, she analyzed subjectivation processes through a raciolinguistic perspective. This conceptualization was informed by a Grounded Theory approach, and the findings show that interviewees re-position schooling experiences and themselves along dominant discourses of racialization and language use.

White speakers reflect on experiences in which they were positioned as the raciolinguistic norm and they re-position themselves as such. Black interviewees and Interviewees of Color discuss experiences in which they were positioned as raciolinguistic Others, whose language use was ignored, devalued, ‘complimented’ or perceived as non-proficient, and they actively engage with these ascriptions.

The interviews show that subject positions powerfully assigned to students concerning plurilingualism shape how they (have to) reflect on experiences in school from a retrospective focus in often re-positioning themselves along assigned positionings.

Overall, the results highlight the necessity of focusing in more detail on how listening positionalities shape language use in society and in schools specifically.

References

Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392.
Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-15.
Chappell, P., Bodis, A., & Jackson, H. (2015). The impact of teacher cognition and classroom practices on IELTS test preparation courses in the Australian ELICOS sector. IELTS research reports online series (6), 1-61.
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. [open access] Rühlmann, L., & McMonagle, S. (2019). Germany’s Linguistic ‘Others’ and the Racism Taboo. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 28(2), 93-100.

International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to share news about the book and reflect on the strength of women’s academic collaborations.

***

Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh

***

Life in a new language

Life in a new language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years.

The aim is to understand the dual challenge of learning a new language while living one’s life through the medium of that language. This is a challenge that remains poorly understood and non-migrants tend to underestimate its severity and the hardships involved.

1. There is the shock of finding oneself in a new linguistic environment where you may not understand much of what is going on around you, while all the time being cognizant of the fact that not understanding what is going on may have acute repercussions for your wellbeing.
2. There is the difficulty of finding work that will not only pay the bills but also sustain your ambitions and self-worth. Most participants took years to recapture their careers, many never did.
3. To improve proficiency in the new language, migrants need to interact in the new language, a task that is made difficult by the frequent absence of interlocutors willing to indulge newcomers, a lack of common topics, and the pervasiveness of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings may go on to reverberate through future interactions as each misunderstanding leads to a loss of confidence that needs to be reclaimed over time.
4. Migration intrudes even into the most intimate domains of life and alters family roles and relationships. It is not only that familial obligations and duties are redistributed but also that new family tasks emerge. Prominent among these are new ways of parenting, including setting an—implicit or explicit—family language policy, and managing child language learning of both new and heritage languages. As children usually learn the new language faster, the potential impact of their superior (oral) proficiency on parental authority can become another tribulation for adult migrants.
5. Migration continues to be imagined as a point of difference from the idealized sedentary mainstream population of their destination. This difference often marks those with a migration history as perpetual outsiders to their new society. Difference may be audible in their ways of speaking and visible where they are differently racialized. Experiences of Othering, exclusion, discrimination, and racism based on such differences create another level of adversity, as migrants need to cope with micro-aggressions, invalidations, insults, and sometimes even assaults.
6. Migration severs the self into a before and after. As pre-migration habits and identities have disappeared, new selves with a new sense of belonging, home, and community need to be fashioned.

Through the voices of our participants, we document the magnitude and anatomy of these challenges. Understanding them leads to an appreciation of migrants’ courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Ethnographic data-sharing and re-use

The research behind Life in a new language was conducted over a period of more than 20 years in six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies. For this book project, we revisited those six projects, shared our data, and re-analyzed them to answer questions about language learning, employment, interaction, parenting, experiences with racism, and sense of belonging.

Our methodological approach was inspired by open science principles and the desire to share our data and to pool our existing resources to be able to paint a bigger picture of language and migration. While most researchers now accept the value of data sharing and reuse, implementation and practice remain patchy, particularly when it comes to qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences. In ethnographic research, data sharing and reuse is in its infancy as researchers struggle with questions on what open research might even mean for them and how to implement FAIR principles, i.e., making their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. These problems are compounded by time pressures and the absence of tried and tested workflows for reanalyzing and bringing to publication shared datasets.

During one of our rare in-person writing workshops

As such, Life in a new language ventures into unchartered methodological territory. We explain the academic motivations, affordances and limitations we encountered in the book. Here, we want to share a more personal story.

The story behind the book

Life in a new language is co-authored by six academic women, who have collaborated over an extended period as members of the Language on the Move research team. Donna, Emily, Shiva, and Vera conducted their PhD research under Ingrid’s supervision, and Loy was mentored by Ingrid as an early career researcher.

As such, Life in a new language shows what can be done with linguistic ethnography and provides a working model for how to combine existing small datasets into larger longitudinal studies of a social phenomenon or practice. It also provides a framework for supervising academics and their doctoral students to create a research and publishing community of practice that connects separate higher degree research projects under a single, post-award project umbrella. Similarly, our study provides a model for early career and experienced scholars to work together to create and analyze big datasets from qualitative methods of inquiry.

Life in a new language is personal in yet another way. For the six of us, the intersection of language learning and settlement is not only an academic research topic. Beyond our academic expertise, we share with our participants the experience of being migrant speakers. Like our participants, our group of authors reflects the diversity of 21^st century Australia. All of us are settlers on Indigenous land. We or our ancestors have come to Australia from Germany, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, the Philippines, and Yugoslavia. Those four of us who came to Australia as adults share with our participants the experience of settling in a new country through the medium of a new language. Our experience as English language teachers and teacher trainers also informs our account. We hope that the way we have pooled our lived experiences in a unique intercultural team to write this book will add richness and depth to our account.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

First up: Katja from Poland
Katja’s engineering degree was not recognized in Australia. She retrained as a beautician. Tremendous skills loss for herself and our society
1/n https://t.co/ehvPDznp6f

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 7, 2023

Good things really do take time

Data collection on the first project to feed into our analysis started in 2000, but the idea for the book and the reanalysis of previously collected datasets started to take shape in 2018, just around the time one of us had a baby. Seeing this little person ready to start school now, has been the yardstick for how long it has taken us to turn a brilliant idea into a completed manuscript.

We not only got derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we also discovered that writing a truly co-authored book with a team of six authors, who are not even co-located, is more challenging than anticipated. It is also much more rewarding and fun.

We learned that the principles of open science can be best brought to life through the spirit of collaboration, engagement, dialogue, and friendship that guided our endeavor. And we warmly recommend collaborative writing to all academic women this International Women’s Day because pooling strengths can better keep us all afloat.

What’s next?

We hope we have whetted your appetite for Life in a new language. The academic publication process is a protracted one and we will share key dates here on Language on the Move as they come to hand.

For now, people in Sydney might want to pencil our International Symposium on Bilingualism workshop devoted to the project into their diaries. For everyone else, we have started a Twitter series @lg_on_the_move, where you can meet one of each of our 130 participants per day while we count down to publication.

Related International Women’s Day content

• 2021, Remembering cancelled women
• 2020, Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• 2019, Why are there so few notable academic women?
• 2018, Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• 2013, Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• 2012, Strange Academic women

Let’s demystify academic publishing! (Image credit: Green Chameleon via Unsplash)

The Next Generation Literacies international research network hosts a free 2-day workshop for PhD candidates and early career researchers devoted to the perennial question how to get published.

When: December 08 and 09, 2021
Where: online (register your attendance here)
Who: PhD candidates and early career researchers

Academic publishing can be a daunting challenge for PhD candidates and early career researchers. In this workshop, we tackle this challenge heads on with the aim to demystify academic publishing. We will be addressing practical questions such as how to transform a research thesis into a journal article, how to select a target journal, how to respond to reviews, how to deal with rejection, and how to maximize impact once you’ve been published. In addition to input from experienced academic authors, reviewers, and editors, you will have the opportunity to receive personalized feedback on a publication project you are currently working on.

Day 1: Wednesday, December 08

8:30 am CEST: Welcome and introduction
8:40 am CEST: International research partnerships and mentoring in a global context

• Professor Claus Krieger, Forschungsdekan Fakultät Erziehungswissenschaft, Universität Hamburg
• Professor Lesley Hughes, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Integrity & Development), Macquarie University
• Professor HU Anning, Dean of Graduate Studies, Fudan University

8:55 am CEST: Journal editors share dos and don’ts

• Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, Editor of Multilingua
• Professor Yongyan Zheng, Editor of Language, Culture and Curriculum
• Professor Ingrid Gogolin, Editor of Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft

10:30 – 11:30 am CEST: Individual consultations (applications have closed)

Day 2: Thursday, December 09

8:30 – 10:30 am CEST: Individual consultations (applications have closed)
10:40 – 11:30 am CEST: Panel discussion with PhD students and early career researchers

• Dr. Irina Usanova, Universität Hamburg
• Dr. Pia Tenedero, Macquarie University and University of Santo Tomas, Philippines
• Qiu Yixi, Fudan University

Please register for this unique professional development opportunity here.

***

The push towards making research free and open to read, in all its parts and forms, from data sets to published output, is a big topic in scholarly communication. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the attitudes and experiences of researchers in language and society when it comes to open research. A new survey is designed to change that.

(Image credit: James Sutton, via Unsplash)

Why is open research important?

The majority of research published with academic publishers remains available only by purchase or subscription, primarily either by an individual researcher or through an institutional library. This significantly limits access.

Open research goes right to the heart of the scholarly mission. After all, scholarship is committed “to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges” (Draft Recommendations of the MIT Task Force on Open Access).

This obviously involves increasing the ability of anyone, anywhere, to read the results and output of scholarly research. For that to happen, research has to be accessible.

When research is open and free to read, it is more visible, potentially more discoverable, and allows researchers internationally to discuss, cooperate, and collaborate. There is a general consensus that open research is more widely read and, as a consequence, more highly cited (Piwowar, et al, 2018).

Another reason relates to equity and inclusion. Making scholarly work free to read removes one barrier to access for those who cannot afford to pay themselves, or work for an institution who cannot cover the costs.

Despite the obvious advantages of open research, the case for it is not clear-cut.

Open access is confusing

It is fair to say that scholars feel increasingly overwhelmed by the constantly changing open research landscape.

Institutions and funding bodies demand that research results are made available openly, but the constraints on which outlet is acceptable is often unclear. There is often a lack of transparency around who pays the price to cover open access publication and what that price is.

In addition to the financial cost is the additional work. It is not always clear whether an open access publication will receive the same level of shepherding, editing, and proofreading from the publisher as a traditional publication or whether the burden is on the author. Some publishers are clear that this is the case, others are less transparent. Some sit in between. Language Science Press, for example, who offer cost-free, open access and peer reviewed publishing, require competency in LaTex for manuscript preparation, or the availability of student assistants who do.

(Image credit: Emily Morter, via Unsplash)

This lack of consistent approach leads to a continued suspicion that an open access publication is less prestigious. This is of particular concern where we are in an ever more competitive job market and every publication choice weighs heavily in the tenure and promotion process. Can early career researchers risk prioritizing open access, if it means choosing a publication with a less prestigious press or a lower impact factor journal? Are more established scholars making choices to publish open access that will help their younger colleagues chose this pathway, too?

Is open access the opposite of academic capitalism?

Open access can be seen, in part, as push back against the consolidation of power, function, and wealth of a small number of large commercial publishers. To engage these commercial entities in a process that will ensure they increase their open access offerings, large institutional and national library consortia are increasingly leveraging their power. Organizations in the US and Germany, for example, have signed agreements on behalf of researchers to enable easier and cheaper access to academic publications.

Some scholars, such as those from the scholar-led or radical open access movements, argue that we should refrain entirely from publishing texts with commercial publishers or in publications that are pay-walled and cost money to read.

Predatory publishing

Digital publishing and open access has also led to a dramatic increase in predatory and fraudulent publishers. It can be incredibly difficult to distinguish legitimate open access publishing entities from predatory ones.

There have been attempts to monitor and list predatory publishers and journals, for example Beall’s List, but these have not been without controversy. The endeavor of creating lists of bad actors can also seem Sisyphean, as the rate at which dubious publishers and conference organizers appear happens with incredible speed. There is research that indicates that “for the most part, young and inexperienced researchers from developing countries” are the ones most susceptible to the entreaties of these publishers (see also Demir, 2018).

Which brings us to our survey!

As mentioned above, we’ve put this survey together to help us better understand the challenges and opportunities relating to open access publishing in sociolinguistics and related disciplines.

The survey includes some basic demographic data gathering: where people are located, what positions they hold, where they completed their doctoral work, and what particular area of research they work in. We include these questions in order to better understand if there are geographical differences or variation depending on seniority. We’ve also included some questions relating to technology and social media in order to understand how researchers are using these channels to promote their work. We also include some definitional questions: Open access, open science, open research, and open data are all part of a range of related yet different concepts. We would like to know what framework people are using when they say ‘open access’.

The questionnaire covers a range of questions relating to researchers’ current practices and future plans. If researchers are publishing open access, how are they funding those publications? We also want to know whether those that have published open access have experienced different approaches from the publisher on aspects of manuscript preparation like copy-editing and proofreading.

We are also interested in understanding whether researchers in our field are being compelled by funding bodies or institutional policies to make their work open. Finally, we’d like to know whether researchers see the practice of making work freely readable as being part of an effort to distribute knowledge more equitably.

Why should you take the survey?

Research on open access publishing practices points to a need for a more detailed understanding of what is happening at a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary level. And while many researchers in sub-disciplines that focus on the nexus between language and society care about the impact of their research beyond their small disciplinary bubble, there are still substantial gaps in our knowledge.

Through the survey, we want to get a clearer picture of attitudes towards and experiences with open research in sociolinguistics and related disciplines.

With our combined research, teaching, and publishing experience, the three of us feel that the first step is to understand the open research landscape in language and society. From there, we hope that more can be done to propel open research forward.

Dr Loy Lising (2nd r.) with members of the SABA collective at the Annual Hazara Academic Awards Night 2021

Editor’s note: Members of the Language-on-the-Move research team undertake numerous forms of service and community outreach throughout the year. We often speak at community events about aspects of intercultural communication, language learning, and bilingual education. In this post, Dr Loy Lising shares a brief report of the Fourth Annual Hazara Academic Awards Night. She attended the event as an invited keynote speaker about heritage language maintenance.

***

Hazaras are a persecuted ethnic minority group in Afghanistan and many have resettled in Australia. Young Hazara Australians have formed an organization called Saba, which is dedicated to inspiring Hazara Australians to pursue their dreams through education.

As part of these efforts, SABA celebrates an Annual Awards Night in honor of community members who have performed exceptionally well in their high-school leaving exams or their university degrees.

This year’s Annual Hazara Academic Awards was featured on ABC News and you can watch short interviews with some of the young achievers who are set to become community leaders and role models for the next generation.

In addition to the awards and cultural performances, the program for the night included a speech about the importance of heritage language maintenance. It was a great honor for me to deliver that speech as a representative of the Language-on-the-Move team and of Macquarie University, where many SABA members study for their degrees.

My task for the evening was to speak about the importance of bilingualism in ensuring community cohesion across generations. At the same time, the evening was a great opportunity to hear powerful stories of resilience, determination, and success.

I sincerely congratulate the awardees on their achievements and thank the Hazara community and particularly the Saba group for letting me share their special night.

In fact, it is a key feature of cancel culture that “to cancel” someone increases their notoriety. As a rule, their name and (mis)deeds gain more publicity; and whether there is such a thing as bad publicity continues to be an open question.

Contrast contemporary “cancel culture” with deeply entrenched long-standing cultural practices that systematically erase some people from the collective memory.

Because it is International Women’s Day, this blog post is dedicated to cancelled women.

What was the maiden name of your great-grandmother?

Do you know the birth names of your four great grandmothers? Chances are that you do not. In most European societies, women have traditionally taken their husband’s name on marriage. Many still do. Even in societies where women do not change their name when they marry, the father’s family name is usually bestowed on the children.

As a result, many people in western societies can trace their paternal ancestries back a couple of generations – simply through the surname. By contrast, maternal lines are quickly forgotten.

I don’t know the birth name of my great-grandmother (left) although the mitochondrial DNA in my body is 100% identical to hers (ca. 1914)

Only few people even know the birth names of their great-grandmothers.

Consider how incredibly strange the absence of that knowledge is! We share an eights of our DNA with each of these four women. If you are a woman yourself, your mitochondrial DNA, which is transferred unaltered from mother to daughter, is 100% identical to one of these four women. So, biologically, great-grandmothers are incredibly close. Yet, few of us stop to consider why we know next to nothing about these women and why even their birth names elude us.

Naming practices are a form of entrenched cancel culture that erase women from the genealogical record.

Did you know that James Douglas left something in your lady parts?

Let me restate the previous section: few women know the names of the mothers with who they share an identical mitochondrial DNA for more than two generations back.

While you grieve for those cancelled women, consider this: in medical terminology, one of your lady parts carries the name of a Scottish man from the 18^th century.

There is a cavity between the uterus and the bowel, which is commonly referred to as “Pouch of Douglas” in English. And the term has been adopted into most other languages. In Arabic, it is called “radabat dughlas”, in French “cul-de-sac de Douglas”, in German “Douglas-Raum”, in Japanese “dagurasu”, in Polish “zatoka douglasa”, or “fondo de saco de Douglas” in Spanish.

How did this name come about? Medicinenet.com has the answer: “the Scottish anatomist James Douglas (1675-1742) […] explored this region of the female body and left his name attached to at least 3 other structural features in the area.”

I feel enraged and grossed out no matter how often I read this explanation.

“Pouch of Douglas”

Douglas certainly made sure he would not get cancelled easily.

Maybe that was because he was part of a generation of men who cancelled a whole class of women and their knowledge: midwives.

Douglas worked at a time when the practice of medicine started to become a scientific discipline. In the process, medicine expanded its remit. Beyond diseases, pregnancy and childbirth also came under its purview. Douglas is usually hailed as one of the first anatomists to specialize in female reproductive organs.

That is only true, of course, if you discount any knowledge not derived through the scientific process. Midwives had had solid knowledge of female anatomy and the processes of pregnancy and childbirth for centuries.

Today, practitioners supporting women through pregnancy and childbirth come in two classes: midwives at the lower end of the professional hierarchy and gynecologists and obstetricians at the upper end. Most of the former are women, most of the latter are men.

So, after our cancelled mothers, let’s remember our cancelled midwives.

Women even get cancelled in favor of a necktie

Before you consider writing in that women have long stopped accepting their collective cancellation and that things are different today, do not bother. I am well aware that we have come a long way. I am also well aware that we still have a long way to go.

Coaster set of famous Croatians

The cancellation of women in matters big and small is a deeply entrenched and ongoing aspect of our culture. I am reminded of that daily by a set of coasters I have in my house. I received these as a gift in 2019.

The set of six coasters celebrate famous Croatians: there is Ivan Vučetić, Faust Vrančić, Eduard Slavoljub Penkala, Ruđer Bošković, and Nikola Tesla.

That is five men (that the concept of nationality did not really apply during their lifetime and that their status as “Croatian” may be debatable is a matter for another time).

Coasters customarily come in sets of six. Who do you think got the sixth slot?

Cvijeta Zuzorić maybe, who ran an influential Renaissance salon and wrote poetry in three languages? Or Paula Preradović, the composer of the Austrian national anthem? Or Savka Dabčević-Kučar, who in the 1960s became one of the world’s first female prime ministers?

Well, no – after five famous Croatian men, the sixth slot went to the famous Croatian necktie.

So, there you have it – even in this day and age, the achievements of women get cancelled in favor of some random object of men’s clothing.

Remembering cancelled women

My elegy for cancelled women could go on and on, and some other time I will write about the cancelled women of linguistics.

Today, just remember this: cultural processes do not rest on individual occurrences but on systematic patterns.

We certainly live in a cancel culture – but not because Dr Seuss did not get mentioned in a speech. We live in a cancel culture because whole groups of people are systematically erased from the historical record, from common knowledge, and from our societal consciousness.

Related Content

• Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• Why are there so few notable academic women?
• Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• Where does academic authority come from?
• Strange academic women
• What would you do?

After 3 years of hard work, today I hit the “submit” button on my PhD thesis

Today, I’ve submitted my PhD for examination – a major milestone on my PhD journey. Time to take stock of the value of investing three years of my life into this rigorous academic endeavour.

I’m going to do so through a thematic analysis of my research journals. In these notebooks I have scribbled information, reflections, research ideas, questions, and inspirations from lectures, readings, reading group sessions, and supervision meetings with Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr. Loy Lising. 10 lessons stand out that helped me not only survive my PhD but thrive and grow as a researcher and person.

1. Listen more. This is the advice my parents gave me on my first day at Macquarie University. It is a reminder that I am a learner, the world is my classroom, and every person and moment that becomes part of it has something to teach me. So, I try to listen for brilliance in formal lectures of experts as well as conversations with 6-year-olds. I also pay more attention to my health now and listen to my body. I don’t check my email on Sunday, I frame each day with prayer, and I cap the year with a silent retreat. These habits of creating more silence around and within me helped me regularly recenter my otherwise easily anxious mind.
2. Go outside your comfort zone. For me this meant being more sociable than I normally am and investing time in building relationships with people whose life and work inspire me to be better. This also meant volunteering, actively seeking out opportunities, and braving the challenge of trying new things (like joining the 3MT!) and exploring new places with new people or, sometimes, by myself.
3. 

   A bit over 3 years ago: first day on campus as a new PhD student with my parents and my new supervisors

   Surround yourself with people who believe in you. This wisdom from Dr. Loy was an important lifeline in moments of self-doubt. In moving out of my comfort zone, I have found new safe spaces, like the Language on the Move reading group that Prof. Ingrid has created for her current and previous PhD supervisees. These like-minded researchers have become my academic family. We support each other by sharing research and life milestones, mentoring each other, and encouraging one another to keep writing and reading.

4. Read good books. The Language on the Move yearly reading challenge has taught me the value of reading beyond my research topic and my usual interest. For instance, I wouldn’t normally read about cyberspace, but I did for my first reading challenge in 2018 and wrote a review about a book on multilingualism on the Internet. Reading widely has stretched my thinking, challenged my own views, and enhanced my writing. Remember to check out our reading challenge for this year!
5. Write every day. This is an advice that worked for Alfredo Roces, a respected Filipino artist and author who wrote a daily column in the Manila Times for 12 years. “Magsulat ka. Gusto mo, ayaw mo, magsulat ka.” (Write. Whether you like it or not, write.) “Write with passion and honesty.” I did my best to do the same, aiming to write at least a few hundred words every day. Of course, it has happened several times that I revised all those words the next day. But no matter, the point is making writing a habit, like brushing your teeth.
6. 

   Members of the Language-on-the-Move team were there to witness my Sunday submission

   Be flexible in a structured way. These words from Livia Gerber, one of my PhD sisters, beautifully captures the attitude and approach that thesis writing (or any kind of purposeful writing) calls for. Planning is always an exciting stage for me, but now, so is re-planning. As Stephen Krashen said, “Rigid outlines are an enemy of creativity. Good writers plan but they’re willing to change their plan.”

7. Reflect. “Reflections on life feed into our research and our research feeds into our life” (Ingrid Piller). Diarizing my plans and thoughts about my progress has helped me stay grounded and cope better with unexpected changes. For example, I learned an important lesson on resilience when the travel restrictions in 2020 cancelled my much-awaited research trip to the US, for which I had received highly competitive funding from Macquarie University. In retrospect, I see how finishing my PhD during the time of pandemic has enriched my research experience in a unique way. Auspiciously, it even extended the relevance of my study, which also looks into work communication practices of offshore accountants working from home, a now-normal situation for many professionals across the globe.
8. Celebrate complexity. One of my early mistakes was trying to paint a simple picture of my data. My supervisors were quick and patient to show me that human beings, the way we use language, and the institutions we shape and that, in turn, shape us are all gloriously complex. The beauty of ethnographic research is that it brings this complexity to light, and it is my duty to be truthful to my findings. My PhD project has been a special opportunity to outgrow my own biases about people and their communication practices and views. Indeed, research has helped widen my understanding of what it means to be human.
9. 

   My supervisor taught me that it takes innumerable carefully placed stitches to create a beautiful whole

   Do one stitch at a time. The PhD is the biggest academic project I have ever undertaken in my life so far. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the idea and to get caught up with the goal of turning in the perfect thesis. But as a wise person once said: there are two kinds of thesis—perfect and submitted. Prof. Ingrid Piller offered different metaphors to capture the sense of steadily working towards completing quality work rather than fixating with the elusive notion of perfection. My favorite metaphor is weaving. Etymologically, the word ‘text’ means ‘something that is woven.’ To produce a big text, the key is to focus on the big idea and to work on one small stitch at a time, steadily chaining the thread, being careful not to drop any stitches, until the idea is finally woven into a whole. Thinking of my work this way helped make it a more manageable and meaningful process.

10. Keep moving. “The PhD is a point on a journey, not the pinnacle of achievement” (Ingrid Piller). Certainly, it is a big milestone. But life goes on after pressing the “submit thesis” button. It is equally essential to anticipate life after PhD. I am grateful to the Macquarie University HDR mentors for organizing a seminar about this and especially to my supervisors, who continue to mentor me as I prepare to go back to my home university in Manila, where I hope to pay it forward.

So should you bother to do a PhD?

For me, it has been a way to become a better version of myself for the world. While not everyone is called to do a PhD, it is a specific path to grow in knowledge of oneself and others, and in virtues of the mind as well as the soul. I am very grateful for this three-year vocation.

Dr Vera Williams Tetteh tells her story to AfrOzcentric

Often in my work as a sociolinguistic ethnographer, I am the one seeking out people and asking questions to learn about their settlement stories. This is what I did for my PhD research – a sociolinguistic ethnography on, with and for Africans in Australia; or what I’m currently doing for a project about the experiences of parents from non-English speaking backgrounds during pandemic-related home learning. So, it was a real surprise when the tables were turned recently and I was approached by AfrOzcentric for an interview.

The team behind AfrOzentric wanted me to share my migration story and PhD journey to be included in a series they are running for African Australians. The interview with Ms Holla David is now available on YouTube.

In our conversation, I not only tell my own story but also highlight the importance of African migrant histories and stories. These are too often overlooked in Australia and the diaspora at large. Bringing them to the attention of a broader audience will enable us to move away from perpetual problem discourses to highlight the contributions that African Australians make to our multilingual and multicultural society.

For me, this involves three key points, related to life in a new country, African history in Australia, and dealing with negative representations of African identity.

Life in a new country

Thinking back to my early years in Australia, I arrived as a family reunion migrant from Ghana, an English-speaking country, full of hope and aspirations for my future and the future of my yet-to-be born children. Things did not pan out as smoothly as I had expected.

First, I was shocked when language turned out to be an issue. In Ghana, which is a former British colony, English is the official language and medium of instruction from primary school through to university. I arrived with the belief that I was an English speaker and would, at least linguistically, slot right into Australia, another former British colony.

But that’s not how it turned out: oftentimes, I couldn’t understand people and they couldn’t understand me, either. That’s how I learned about linguistic variation and that there are different varieties of English.

Finding a job that was equivalent to the one I had previously done in Ghana was another challenge. Therefore, when I started a family, I put my career aspirations on hold and worked part-time as a checkout operator in a supermarket.

It took me ten years to go back to university. Starting full-time studies while looking after my family and working part-time was incredibly challenging, particularly as I did not have the kind of family support I would have had back home in Ghana. I’m grateful for the kindness of the people who have been willing to support and mentor me throughout the years.

I would particularly like to acknowledge my academic mentors, who helped me navigate the, for me, unchartered waters of academia. The guidance of my sociolinguistics lecturer during my undergraduate years, Dr Verna Rieschild, was crucial during my undergraduate and honours years, and the same is true of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller during my PhD and postdoctoral career.

African history in Australia

1834 portrait of William Blue, by J. B. East (Source: Wikipedia)

Black African people are often made to feel like they do not belong in Australia. In reality, Africans have settled in Australia for as long – or as short – a time as whites, and belong as much, or as little.

Therefore, it’s important to share the little-known history of African people in Australia.

You, too, may be surprised to learn that Black Africans arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788 (Pybus, 2006a, 2006b). In her book Black Founders, Cassandra Pybus shares the stories of famous bushranger John Black Caesar, or Billy Blue, who has the Sydney suburb of Blues Point named after him.

Back then “the notion of race was a highly malleable construct, […] and the binary of black or white was not a reliable way of constructing difference” (Pybus, 2006a, p. 181).

Pybus’ account complicates assumptions that race in colonial Australia was an Aboriginal (black) and European (white) binary. However, the African presence in colonial Australia from first fleeters to the steady trickle of black convicts and free people who followed “have been completely whited out of Australian colonial history” (Pybus, 2006b, p. 41).

Negative representations of African identity

The erasure of African people from Australian history goes hand in hand with contemporary racism and the inescapable negative representations of Africans in Australia. The predominant media representations range from pitiful refugees via scheming fraudsters to violent gangsters. Obviously, the vast majority of African-Australians simply do not see themselves represented.

In other words, there is a huge gap between the ways in which African-Australians are seen and the ways in which they see themselves. This gap needs to be bridged.

One way of doing so is through research. My PhD research, a sociolinguistic ethnography on, with and for Africans in Australia, for instance, challenged the homogenised view of African-Australians as a monolithic group by examining the diverse pre- and post-migration experiences of black African immigrants, particularly as they relate to language learning, education and employment.

Focusing on differences in pre-migration educational opportunities and the status of English in their countries of origin, the analysis distinguished four groups: migrants from Anglophone African countries who have completed secondary education or above; migrants from non-Anglophone African countries who have completed secondary education or above; migrants from Anglophone African countries who have had no or low schooling; and migrants from non-Anglophone African countries who have had no or low schooling.

Overall, I found a persistent mismatch between diverse pre-migration linguistic repertories and education trajectories, and post-migration language training and education pathways into settlement in Australia. This mismatch is at the heart of the disadvantage in the Australian labour market experienced by many African-Australians. In short, my research demonstrates the harm that comes from telling a single story.

Indeed, one of my favourite African proverbs goes as follows: “So long as the lions do not have their own historians the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” It is my hope also that we will get to hear more stories and interpretations of African migrant stories through their own voices.

If this has whetted your appetite, head over to YouTube and watch the full interview:

References

Pybus, C. J. (2006a). Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers. Sydney: University of New South Wales.
Pybus, C. J. (2006b). Race relations and early Australian Settlement. The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring), 39-48.
Williams Tetteh, Vera. (2015). Language, education and settlement: A sociolinguistic ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia. (PhD), Macquarie University, Sydney.

*** 

Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youth from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. Following on from their recent post about the revalorization of Chinese dialects, the second article of this 3-part series explores the state of minority languages in China.

***

Maoduoli candy from Yunnan is a huge success. Its name means “bright boy” in the Dai language.

Yunnan province is one of the most linguistically diverse provinces in China. It also ranks near the bottom for degree of socioeconomic development in China. With China’s rapid development in the world economy, Yunnan is seeking to capitalize on its linguistic and cultural heritage to integrate itself into China’s regional expansion. Tourism is one of the three pillar industries in Yunnan, and offers associated business opportunities related to minority languages.

Ethnic minority people’s languages and their cultural products increasingly come to be seen as a form of capital to boost the local economy.

This is apparent in the names and images of local foods, as Xiong Qingqing (熊青青) has found. Xiong finds that ethnic minority languages transcribed in Mandarin scripts can create exotic and authentic feelings among Chinese customers who are keen to purchase these commodities. Maoduoli (猫哆哩) is such a case in point: this snack made from local fruit is named after a word from the Dai language, where “Maoduoli” means “bright boy”. Since it was first sold online in 2011, Maoduoli has gained such nationwide popularity that there was a significant rise in its Baidu index from 300 to 2500 within half a year.

Ethnic minority people lack interest in maintaining their heritage languages

The commodification of ethnic minority languages has been studied by many scholars both in China and the world. Some of our students are ethnic minorities themselves, but what they have observed is quite different from the official discourse of celebrating diversity via tourism. Their studies indicate that ethnic minority people themselves do not have much confidence in maintaining their heritage languages.

Wang Liping’s (王丽萍) study is based on the language practices of Bai people from Heqing, Yunnan. Despite the tourist discourse in promoting Bai language and cultural products, the local Bai people see it as challenging to revitalize their heritage language. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, the Bai language in Heqing has no written script and Bai people do not have any religious belief or other strong ideological desire to maintain their cultural practices.

Second, Heqing’s geographical location between two popular tourist destinations (Dali and Lijiang) have actually sped up the loss of Bai. This is due to the fact that more and more translocal migrants settle down in Heqing and marry locals. In the process, Putonghua replaces Bai as the medium for family and wider communication.

Third, many local Bai people migrate to more developed cities in the east of China for better prospects.

Finally, despite the discursive valorization of Bai as a commodity, the language has not been legitimized in the mainstream educational system.

For all these reasons, Bai people do not find it worthwhile to pass Bai on to their younger generation. Instead, the prefer to invest in Putonghua and English. According to Wang’s study with Bai people of different age groups, young people between 7 and 18 have only receptive but no productive knowledge of Bai language, even though they live in a Bai-centered region.

Constructing ethnic minority language as soft power

Despite the lack of interest in minority language maintenance on the part of minority groups, local governments are keen to promote these languages by displaying ethnic minority language signage at tourist destinations (see also Yang Hongyan’s study) and other public spaces. Such top-down approaches to revitalizing ethnic minority languages and cultural practices become more prominent in Yunnan’s border regions such as 西双版纳 (Xishuangbana; see map), a Dai-centered city bordering Myanmar and Laos.

Bai Qiongfang’s (白琼芳) analysis of official documents about the promotion of Dai and Dai culture indicates that Xishuangbanna is becoming a window targeting its neigbouring countries where there are many cross-border ethnic groups living on both sides of the border and sharing a similar language and culture.

Dai people constitute the majority in Xishuangbanna. The Dai are called Shan in Myanmar, and Dai language is also similar to Laotian, the national language of Laos. Given its geopolitical importance, Dai language is not only promoted as commodity but more importantly as “soft power of the borderland”. By making use of digital information technologies and social media transmission, the quality of spreading Dai language and culture has been greatly enhanced, and many national projects and funding supports have been granted to revitalize Dai language and culture via TV/radio/movies and by compiling Dai textbooks and a dictionary.

The local government has even initiated a new policy requiring local leaders and civilians to wear ethnic minority clothes and accessories for at least two days a week.

The increasing visibility of minority languages and cultural practices in China and across its border constitutes a new perspective on China’s language practices in which ethnic minority languages are part of China’s soft power projection, revitalization of the local economy and reinforcement of minority groups’ cultural confidence. However, it remains to be seen whether the discourse of constructing ethnic minority languages as commodity and symbolic identity is actually beneficial to ethnic minorities and does not create more tensions and discontinuities within ethnic minorities and cross-border groups.

Despite the discourse of embracing diversity and having abundant linguistic and cultural resources in Yunnan, we should not exaggerate the idea of multicultural prosperity.

Based on our decades of teaching experience, we are well aware that only a very small number of ethnic minority students can overcome the linguistic and social barriers to being accepted into university. English still constitutes a huge barrier for their access to equal education especially in remote and minority-centered regions of Yunnan. An in-depth and longitudinal study is needed in future in order to understand how ethnic minority students might get empowered through education and at work. What our students Zhu Ziying (朱子莹), Li Jincheng(李锦程), Liu Zongtuo(刘宗拓),Bi Yanming(毕砚茗) and Li Jia have been doing in recent months and in the years to come is to investigate how language shapes the educational and employment trajectories of Yi ethnic minority students and hopefully our study might contribute to the linguistic diversity at the borderlands.

In the next and final part of this series, we’ll focus more on these cross-border languages and explore foreign language learning of languages other than English in China.

Related content

• Baioud, Gegentuul, Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?
• Grey, Alexandra, How do language rights affect minority languages in China?
• Li, Jia and Lv, Yong, Power to Fangyan!
• Ma, Yuanmeng, Empowerment of Chinese Muslim women through Arabic?
• Piller, Ingrid, Access denied

*** 

Editor’s note: There is a Chinese saying that two heads are better than one (三个臭皮匠赛过一个诸葛亮). This proverb emphasizes both collective wisdom and the value of grassroots work. At its best, teaching is both. In this mini-series, Dr LI Jia and Ms LV Yong, Yunnan University, share how teaching about linguistic diversity has changed their understanding of linguistic diversity. Specifically, they summarize the findings of 77 small research projects undertaken by their undergraduate students. These research projects provide insight into the multifaceted and dynamic language experiences of Chinese youths from Yunnan province, a highly diverse border region in the southwest of China. In the first article of this 3-part series, we learn how Chinese dialects (“fangyan”) are increasingly valorized as an expression of distinctive identity and as a profitable commodity.

***

(Source: Language Atlas of China, Wikipedia)

Fangyan (方言) is usually translated as “dialect” into English, meaning a variety of Mandarin. 70% of China’s 1.4 billion people speak eight different types of Mandarin and only a small number of these speak standard Mandarin, or Putonghua, as their mother tongue. Speaking Fangyan has long been associated with social stereotypes such as lack of education and low-class status. However, such negative indexicality of speaking Fangyan has been challenged by the COVID-19 outbreak and by the emerging circulation of diverse social media online.

Fangyan as an index of authenticity and authority

Speaking Fangyan is increasingly considered as an index of authenticity and a source of authority. This can be observed in an increasing number of Chinese movies, songs, TV series and other entertainment programs. In 2019, the animated movie “Ne Zha”, for instance, raked in over 4.6 billion yuan at the box office. Sichuan Fangyan was used right at the beginning of the film to indicate the main character Ne Zha’s origin from Sichuan.

The choice of Fangyan not only brings our attention to history but also returns to the lived experiences of contemporary people.

This is confirmed by student Shi Lihua’s (施利华) interview with the director Zhou Jueyu, whose work “Sleepless in Licang” won the first prize for the second Asian Micro Film Festival held in Lincang, a border city between China and Myanmar. In her study, Shi describes that “the grassroots story in Lincang Fangyan captures the theme of facing setbacks in life, moving forward bravely, living with a smile and ultimately achieving success”.

The emotional attachment to speaking Fangyan is also confirmed by Li Jie’s (李杰) observation on the daily circulation of short-video platforms. Easy access to Fangyan via short-video APPs provides hundreds of millions of Chinese migrant workers and students with a space for connection and psychological comfort.

Fangyan as a source of success and knowledge dissemination

Poster of the “1.3 Billion Decibel” show

Fangyan is also promoted as a source of success and knowledge dissemination by celebrities and academic scholars via different social media. The “1.3 Billion Decibel” music competition, for example, was established in 2016 and has become the most popular music TV show promoting Fangyan via singing contests across 32 Chinese provinces and regions. By combining Fangyan with popular songs, Chinese grassroots singers’ creativity and talents have been acknowledged by wider audiences and the value of speaking Fangyan has been revitalized among diverse populations in China.

Besides, some Chinese linguists have made use of online resources to highlight the historical relevance of and knowledge inheritance from Fangyan.

According to Li Jie’s analysis of video posts on TikTok by Ruan Guijun from Wuhan University, Fangyan contains rich resources for exploring Chinese proverbs, riddles and other civilizational knowledge. Fangyan as historical reference has been promoted via the form of “the Fangyan Poem Contest” to celebrate the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019. Based on Li Jie’s study, Chinese audiences are aware of the historical connection between Fangyan and ancient poems. It is through reading Chinese ancient poems that Fangyan instead of Putonghua is constructed as legitimate medium of classical and advanced Chinese literary works. In the process, respect towards Fangyan is also revitalized.

Fangyan as commodified capital

The choice of using Fangyan to advertise China’s high-tech commodities such as Huawei mobile phone has also proven a great success. According to Zhao Yang’s (赵洋) analysis of Chinese netizens’ comments, Fangyan embedded in a giant high-tech company not only enhances Fangyan speakers’ confidence towards their mother tongue, but also indicates Huawei’s innovation and willingness to include linguistic diversity other than Putonghua and English. As such, Fangyan becomes one of the branding resources for advertisements and constitutes a selling point to attract potential customers from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Fangyan as a commodity is also apparent on social media. In Li Jie’s analysis of online celebrities, speaking Fangyan does not reduce but attract millions of followers and significant sums of money for advertising products. 多语和毛毛姐 (name of short video owner), for example, speaks Guizhou Fangyan and has become one of the most popular celebrities with over 33 million followers in China.

Speaking Fangyan is not only confined to Chinese people. Many foreigners living and working in China have come to realize the value of speaking Fangyan. Speaking Fangyan can construct their identity as a 中国通 (China expert) for newly arrived foreigners and as cross-cultural communicator for introducing Chinese local practices.

Yan Wenzhen’s (闫文珍) study with foreigners speaking Chinese Fangyan contributes an interesting language practice which is often overlooked, if not ignored, by the mainstream educational discourse. In her study, Yan has exemplified how foreigners make use of TikTok and Fangyan to display their local knowledge and attract followers. 伊博, for instance, is an African man living in Shenyang, northeast of China. Speaking Shenyang Fangyan and capturing foreigners’ linguistic and cultural challenges living in their local community has helped him win over 6 million followers. Behind this number follows his social reputation and material rewards.

The studies of our students are mainly based on their observations and lived experiences. They chose to research Fangyan because none of them speak Putonghua as their mother tongue and they all have to take a Putonghua proficiency test to prove their ability, which will in turn impact their job prospects. All of our students, and ourselves included, have our own problems in speaking “perfect” Putonghua. However, access to learning about linguistic diversity and online resources undoubtedly provides us with a third space to reconstruct our connection with Fangyan in the tensions between power and social justice.

In the next part of this series, we’ll move beyond Chinese to consider yet another aspect of China’s linguistic diversity: ethnic minority languages and their changing role.

Besides meetings, webinars, and classes, another traditionally face-to-face event organized this year via Zoom is the 3-minute thesis (3MT) competition.  This yearly academic contest, which challenges students to explain their thesis in three minutes to a non-specialist audience, was started during one of the worst droughts in the history of Australia. With the current COVID-19 pandemic far from over, the 3MT organizers decided to go virtual this year.

On 11 August 2020, the Macquarie University Linguistics Department hosted its first-ever virtual 3MT competition. My contribution, which won the People’s Choice Award, is about the communication practices and ideologies of globalized accountants in the Philippines. Unlike many, they did not start to work remotely during the pandemic but have been doing so for a long time. In my presentation, I highlight the unique challenges of professional communication from home in multilingual, global work contexts. These points are discussed at length in my online lectures on how Global South accountants are prepared to communicate in Global North workplaces and lessons about working from home.

While it is tempting to think that joining a virtual 3MT is faster and easier, my experience is quite the opposite. Surely, the competition proper was a less tensed moment for me and my fellow-participants as we sat and watched our pre-recorded presentations. However, such a small production involves a big investment of time and effort, as faculty members doing online teaching this semester can testify. Even so, a memorable learning experience!

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

As researchers and teachers, we know that our work is thoroughly social. We accept that we have an ethical responsibility to society and the people who both enable our work and need it. The societal impact of universities, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to the short-term impact increasingly required by funding bodies.

From social to market-based understandings of societal impact

“Researchers’ Night” is an outreach event of the University of Jyväskylä for community members of all ages (Image credit: University of Jyväskylä)

Since the 1970s, a new “entrepreneurial” and “innovative” ethos started to be naturalized in higher education, leading to a discussion of marketization and commodification of higher education conceptualized as “academic capitalism”. This development coincided with demands for a de-bureaucratization of public institutions like universities, thus creating a situation where the bureaucratic budget steering of the public sector made way for an accountability and evaluation based steering. This coincided with neoliberal New Public Management (NPM) theories that called for a decentralized market-like governance of the public sector.

My rant hits this paradox: how can we make universities more meaningful for and in society, while accommodating the market demands steering of higher education? Closer to home: how can we, in the RECLAS collegium, criticize managerialist funding practices and the demands that come with them, while at the same time participating in the game and playing by its rules?

I first discuss meanings of the term “societal impact” for higher education and society at large. In particular: how is societal impact understood and measured? I will then discuss the funding of universities from the perspective of societal impact. This will lead me to a discussion of the artificial divide between basic and applied research and the relevance of this divide for societal relevance of higher education. I finish with a call for arenas for societal impact that go beyond entrepreneurial and market based logics and loop back to the traditional tasks of research and teaching.

What is societal impact?

The basic tasks of higher education are, in the Humboldtian tradition, research and teaching. The “third mission” or “societal” turn of the 1970s was originally understood as co-operation of higher education with governments, industry and society at large, and operationalized as contributions of teaching and research to societal life and political decision making on one hand, and as commercialization of that teaching and research on the other.

A way of further understanding the third mission is to divide it into the social, the enterprising, and the innovative third mission. Especially since the 1970s, the “second academic revolution” has seen a turn from teaching and research to services to community and society – which, in turn, might or might not imply economic benefits to someone.

Critical voices have problematized this naturalization of an industrial and entrepreneurial third mission, which has its roots in demands for ex-post accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness. What is typical of this managerialist turn is that while the formal (normative and regulative) steering of higher education has loosened, the “soft demands” (persuasive and informal) have tightened, making the steering of higher education more opaque.

University funding and societal impact

How do we, then, know what societal impact is? I would like to suggest that the question should not be what but when. I will illustrate this with an example from higher education funding.

The basic tasks of universities, namely education, research, and the dissemination of knowledge gained through research, are ultimately very societal in nature and at the heart of universities’ societal impact mission. Because of this societal task, universities are generally either publicly funded or exempt from taxes in their fundraising even in the most market-oriented systems.

The Strategic Research Funding instrument, coordinated by the Academy of Finland, is an example of funding that is allocated to “high-quality research that has great societal impact” (Image credit: Academy of Finland)

However, in recent years, funding for higher education has started to include more performance based or strategically steered elements, as political goals of “societal impact” have been included in funding systems. Consequently, an increasing proportion of core funding for universities is now allocated as competitive funding or performance based funding; i.e. not as consistent or steady basic funding but funding based on politically dependent criteria and indicators. This applies to both traditional research funding (= need to anticipate impacts of research in funding applications) as well as teaching (= need to provide a particular amount of Masters degrees rather than a particular “amount of critical thinking”).

The societal benefits of higher education are, however, (only) partly predictable. Society needs experts and professionals trained by universities. So much is obvious. But not even the labor market demand for public sector workers such as doctors, teachers, or librarians is easily predictable. And it is even more difficult to anticipate long term impacts of research that is accumulated over decades and centuries. Development of critical thinking is no easier measured. The public funding of universities, thus, is largely based on the funder’s trust on this long-term benefit of higher education without any explicit indicators.

Thus, there is a mismatch between the long-term activities (or “impact”) of universities and their short-term strategic decision-making.

This mismatch affects the universities’ core functions. Funding models and strategic funding may change as political cycles change, and yet, universities need to enter a short-term funding competition based largely on strategizing societal tasks and societal usefulness of their activities to be successful. However, the activities of universities have long-term effects, which are less predictable and less easily measurable.

Societal impact and the artificial divide between “basic” and “applied” research

How, then, can societal impact be understood? What is societal impact? It seems that at least a part of the divide between “research” and “societally relevant research” is based on a divide between basic vs applied research. We have been conditioned to think of research either as something that is inspired by research curiosity (“basic research”) or something that is inspired by a desire to apply that research into practice (“applied research”).This thinking can lead to two kinds of fundamental value judgements on the importance of research:

• Basic research is seen as “academic”, “timeless” and “accumulating knowledge”, whereas applied research is seen as “practical”, “fast” and “accumulating (economic) benefits”
• Basic research is seen as “useless” (for society and economy in particular), whereas applied research is seen as “useful” (for society and economy in particular)

However, the divide between basic and applied research is based on problematic premises and an artificial divide that has its origins in statistical and registry needs rather than actual research internal needs. The linear assumptions of research curiosity leading to basic research, further leading to practical applications, and ending at technological innovations do not hold empirically. “Applied” innovations can lead to “basic” research questions and “basic” research can have very immediate practical applications. Thus, Donald Stokes’ concept of use inspired basic research may be useful, bridging “research promise and societal need”.

Equally, the divide between usefulness or uselessness of research is artificial because just as it is difficult to know whether research is useful, it is equally difficult to know when it is useful. The time span to evaluate the usefulness or scientific work is beyond economic quarterly assessments. It is impossible to know, on a short term basis, what is beneficial for society in the long term. This tweet about the dismissal of coronavirus research as unimportant, even only a year ago provides a stark example:

Why competitive project-based funding is bad for research, part 856249: French scientists specialising in coronavirus research were repeatedly denied funding because their topic was deemed not fashionable enough (and reviewers argued symptoms in humans were `just like a cold`) https://t.co/4OkpiYwwmx

— Aline Courtois (@Aline_Courtois) March 9, 2020

Additionally, the example of the dismissal of coronavirus research also calls into question the overall ethicality of government-steered research. By submitting research to the dictates of short-term payoffs through the denial of long-term guaranteed funding, the overall resilience of higher education – and, hence the overall benefit to humanity – is reduced. A famous example is Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine: Salk did not seek a patent as he felt the rights of the vaccine should be owned by the people. The main value here is to pay it forward to the common good, not to funders and markets.

Should research be societally relevant? Yes.

Do we know what is societally relevant? No. Or, to be precise, not in the short term.

In the end, the societal impact requirement has turned from an integral part of our research and teaching activities into a naturalized political demand, rewarding us for things that are secondary to our ethical responsibility for society.

As academics, this places us in a difficult position. We are good at arguing to ourselves why we need to participate in the “neoliberal governmentality game” of applying for top funding such as the RECLAS profiling money. We have internalized a self-governing ethos where we monitor our behavior and check our Google Scholar citations while at the same time criticizing neoliberal academia with traditional humanist arguments. We need to prove our societal worth by planning, executing and demonstrating societal impact in our research, to the extent that we have lost sight of what societal impact of higher education is.

What should we, then, actually talk about when we talk about societal impact?

Echoing Laredo’s (2007) idea of teaching and research in different constellations as the main roles of the university, I would like us to go back to the intertwined role of teaching and research justifying funding. Universities need funding because they teach and research for the common good. That is a high value. We cannot know the precise minutiae of the societal impact of our work and we must be willing to live with this uncertainty.

References

Laredo, P. (2007). Revisiting the Third Mission of Universities: Toward a Renewed Categorization of University Activities? Higher Education Policy, 20(4), 441-456.
Stokes, D. E. (2011). Pasteur’s quadrant: Basic science and technological innovation. Brookings Institution Press.

In academia, for instance, we often hear that women have made substantial gains in recent years and now account for close to half of all faculty members in universities. But you know where those gains have been made? In untenured positions, casual positions, and positions below the Senior Lecturer level. According to Inside Higher Education, the rate of full professors – the ultimate prize on the academic career ladder – has remained steady at around 15% of all faculty members in the past twenty years. Only around 9% of women who become academic staff members achieve full professor status – that’s not counting all the PhDs who do not ever become academic staff members in the first place. And even if a woman achieves full professor status, she can expect to earn less than her male peers.

If you think that’s bad, look outside academia:

white men make up more than 80% of Congress, 78% of state political executives, 75% of state legislators, 84% of mayors of the top 100 cities, 85% of corporate executive officers, 100% of CEOs of Wall Street firms, 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 73% of tenured professors, 64% of newsroom staffers, 97% of heads of venture capital firms, 90% of tech jobs in Silicon Valley, 97% of owners of television and radio licenses, 87% of police departments and 68% of U.S. Circuit Court Judges (Feagin & Ducey, 2017, p. 2)

In addition to these indicators of formal power, it’s also worth thinking about informal power. In academia, informal power results from reputation and “impact.” If you google “most famous linguists”, for instance, you get Noam Chomsky at number one (no surprise there), and then Pier Paolo Pasolini, Anthony Burgess (why?!), Al-Biruni, Larry Wall (the creator of the PERL programming language), Leone Battista Alberti, Steven Pinker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Edward Sapir, and Mikhail Bakhtin as the top ten.

While the definition of “linguist” used by ranker.com is, well, “interesting” and while I was surprised to see that the list is somewhat less Anglo-centric than one might have expected, the list is certainly male.

Incidentally, the first woman to appear on the list is Carol Chomsky at #18. Good on her but up until now I did not even know that the wife of Noam Chomsky was a linguist, too. And this gives us a first indication where female power – formal or informal – comes from: rare as it is, female power most often accrues to women who are associated with powerful men.

The top ten linguists according to Google Scholar (which only ranks those with a Google Scholar profile) are also exclusively male and, now, white and Anglophone: George Lakoff, MAK Halliday, James Paul Gee, Steven Pinker (the only one on both lists), Stephen C. Levinson, Ray Jackendoff, Douglas Biber, JR Martin, Dan Jurafsky, and Harald Baayen. Anna Wierzbicka is the first woman at #11 – just a little too late to show her on the first page of search results …

In this day and age, this continued male dominance is puzzling, seeing that men and women are formally equal in most societies around the globe, and have been so for a while. Continued white male dominance is particularly puzzling in western academia, which has embraced a rhetoric of gender and racial equality. In fact, valuing diversity is high on the mission statements of most universities. Despite all this, the rise of white women to power has been painfully slow and that of women of color even more so (in the USA, 3.5% of full professors are Asian women, 2.6% Latinas, and 1.6% Black women).

A comparison with shamanism might provide an explanation.

Just like academia has its hierarchy of casual tutors, postdocs, associate lecturers, assistant professors, senior lecturers, associate professors, readers, full professors, and distinguished professors, shamanism recognizes a hierarchy formally marked through initiation and progression rituals.

Also like academia, shamanism embraces an egalitarian rhetoric and, theoretically, male and female shamans have an equal chance to reach the most powerful shamanic rank of zaarin or duurisah. In fact, it is widely assumed that women are spiritually more talented than men and connect to the spirit world more easily, as Manduhai Buyandelger describes in Tragic Spirits, an ethnography of shamanism in Mongolia.

Even so – and that’s the final parallel with academia – male shamans progress to the highest ranks and female shamans don’t:

The [shamans] who had achieved the highest rank were almost exclusively male, whereas a disproportionate number of female shamans were stuck somewhere in the middle, having performed only three or four shanars [=initiation and progression rituals] out of the seven needed to reach the [top] title of duurisah. (Buyandelger, 2013, p. 172)

The careers of female shamans stall for a variety of reasons. To understand those, one must keep in mind that achieving the highest rank in any career is expensive, labor-intensive and time-consuming.

To start a career – be it as academic or as shaman – certainly requires individual talent and gift but it also requires a material investment: access to higher education in one case, access to performance spaces, shamanic paraphernalia, and livestock in the latter.

To advance their careers, shamans need to gain followers. This is achieved particularly through travel and hosting.

By travelling, shamans learn more about the spirit world and also expand their networks. However, travel is easier for men than for women. The latter are tied down by care obligations at home and, if they travel, the threat of sexual violence is ever present.

Hosting ceremonies and after-ceremony parties is another way for shamans to further their careers. Again, hosting is easier for men than for women. The powerful male shamans featured in Tragic Spirits controlled large rural households: that meant space to stage a performance for large numbers of people, the material resources to host them, and the support cast to have them well looked after.

Female shamans, by contrast, might only have access to a tiny apartment where few guests could be accommodated; they might not have the financial resources to acquire provisions; and they were dependent on their husbands and in-laws for permission to host guests. Even with permission, they might face the double burden of staging a ceremony and looking after their guests’ well-being.

Like shamanic careers, academic careers are advanced by mobility and performance. Like for shamanic women, mobility and performance raise conundrums for academic women, as they often bring professional and personal lives in conflict.

To succeed as a shaman – and, I would venture, in any career – professional and personal lives have to be in harmony, as Buyandelger (2013, p. 190) explains:

In order to achieve the status of a full-fledged shaman and then to maintain that status successfully and continuously, a person must be free from daily household and family duties while still receiving services and benefits from their family members and utilizing the domestic space and the household money. To some extent, a shaman, whether male or female, needs a “wife” – a virtuous and nurturing individual who is versed in shamanic knowledge and who voluntarily structures her life around the unpredictable life of a shaman.

It is, of course, not difficult to guess that male shamans are much more likely to have a “wife” in their lives than female shamans.

Not only are female shamans less likely to have a “wife” in their lives, there is something else in the professional-personal tension that holds them back. In order to be successful in any career, professional expertise is not enough. To reach the top of your career, you also need the right kind of personality.

What the right kind of personality is differs for men and women. Top shamans need a spotless reputation. For women that includes marriage and motherhood. However, marriage and motherhood then become precisely the personal obstacles that make shamanic advancement difficult.

Even if in slightly different forms, the double bind that pits professional proficiency against gender proficiency is the principle obstacle to the advancement of women to top positions in any field.

Furthermore, in order to succeed, the conflict between professional and personal success that many women experience must be silenced. There are no heroic narratives of overcoming challenges resulting from not having a “wife”, and women’s stories about such challenges sound disfluent and whining. To articulate the conflict between the professional and the personal is to admit failure and, hence, constitutes a career obstacle.

Ultimately, as long as institutions claim gender neutrality it will always only be a minority of women who advance to positions of power:

The conflict between the public expectations that female shamans can become as powerful as male shamans and society’s unwillingness to recognize the concrete obstacles that limit women’s quest for power results in a double disadvantage for female shamans. (Buyandelger, 2013. p. 200)

Just substitute “academic” for “shaman”!

References

Buyandelger, M. (2013). Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Feagin, J. R., & Ducey, K. (2017). Elite White Men Ruling: Who, What, When, Where, and How. London: Routledge.

Related Content

• Why are there so few notable academic women?
• Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• Where does academic authority come from?
• Strange academic women
• What would you do?

Laura and Alex getting ready for their presentation at the Humboldt Symposium

This time two years ago, Alexandra Grey (my blog co-author) and I had realized that there were important strands of research underway in Australia and around the world in which linguistic and legal scholarship and practices were made relevant to one another, and we started talking more and more about how to better share knowledge between these researchers. It seemed that this research was disparate and that opportunities for interdisciplinary scholars to meet, collaborate and publish together were sporadic. We also wanted to build a clearer public profile to amplify emerging, interdisciplinary scholars like ourselves.

Our focus was not just the particularities and painfulness of legal jargon, so we didn’t fit the “Plain English” profile. And neither of us would have said our research could use the label “forensic linguistics” in the sense of investigating crime, or even in a broader sense of relating to language issues in courts. And yet we had a lot of interest in forensic linguists and other researchers we chanced upon who were combining law and language studies. Oftentimes we also had shared methods, and background reading, and problems. Despite this inchoate but real shared interest, we found there was little in the way of a cohesive articulation of how (or whether) there are theoretical and methodological bases upon which a field – sometimes also called ‘legal linguistics’ – is developing. We believed that this was limiting collaboration and limiting the strength with which researchers could present their work to audiences from distinct disciplines, particularly to legal scholars and practitioners.

So, we launched the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) in early 2019, with a workshop-focused symposium for 31 participants. LLIRN closed out 2019 with 93 listserv members! We ended the year with LLIRN members presenting at the interdisciplinary Humboldt Symposium on ‘Sharing Knowledge’. With the support from the Humboldt Foundation, we also provided two scholarships for postgraduate student members to attend that conference. A couple of weeks later, we formed a panel of legal practitioners, researchers from the Federal Government’s forthcoming National Indigenous Languages Report, and early career researchers, to discuss linguistic diversity as a challenge to legal policy at the annual Australian Linguistics Society conference. We also sourced questions for that panel through LLIRN! We hope the momentum of LLIRN activities initiated by us and by our members continues into 2020. As we look back on the first year of its existence what have we LLIRNed so far? (Surely a pun this bad befits the season of Christmas cracker jokes.)

These events have been a good opportunity to reflect on our motivations and hopes for organizing the LLIRN. Over the last few years, we had both read, applied and contributed to research at the intersection of law and linguistics, as law school postdocs and, before that, as we undertook our doctorates together at Macquarie University’s Department of Linguistics. In brief, Alex’s doctorate was a legal and ethnographic examination of China’s constitutional minority language rights and Laura’s was on discourse, power and language ideology in official asylum seeker applications processes and political and media discourse in Australia.

Plus, we had had incredibly enriching experiences as part of the Language on the Move research group and therefore knew the value of building research networks of peers, mentors and mentees, sharing research findings, and building research leadership skills. It was through our participation in this group that we met each other, and developed a relationship of collaborating, organizing events and providing each other feedback on our work, sharing experiences and advice around publishing and career progression. So we were inspired to build a similar network at the junction of legal and linguistic research.

Purposefully expanding beyond our scholastic comfort zone, we sought to bring together researchers with varied approaches, including scholars of language rights and policy; forensic linguists; court translation and interpretation specialists; discourse analysts looking at varied state processes and state agencies, legislative corpus researchers, those concerned with diversity and equality, and those who teach university courses about language and the law. We identified and invited researchers from around Australia, as well as some international participants and an international keynote speaker, from a range of disciplines, and at all career stages to our inaugural Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Symposium in April 2019 at Sydney Law School.

To build up awareness and community between these participants, the theme of our inaugural symposium was: ‘What do we share?’ A seemingly simple question… To help answer it, we sent out a 10-question survey, asking our inaugural symposium’s participants about their qualifications, affiliations, methods, theoretical approaches, and subject matter.

Professor Katrijn Maryns during the Inaugural Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Symposium in April 2019 at Sydney Law School

Amongst the initial participants, there was a high proportion with tertiary qualifications in both law and linguistics. Many also had first-hand or up-close experience of being a learner of a second or subsequent language, and many had experience applying academic knowledge in non-academic settings, including policy work, legal practice, professional translation and interpreting and non-academic linguistic work. Because of these applied jobs and disciplinary cross-overs, the need to communicate nuanced, research-based knowledge in accessible and practical ways has been a familiar challenge on the radar of LLIRN from the outset.

We proposed, at the symposium, that the emerging field coheres around three broad research problems – language-related social justice, regulation of language, and inequalities and hurdles in bureaucratic processes – and five key types of phenomena being studied: speech/language variation; language ideologies; intercultural (mis)communication; rules and policy; and processes of social and political change. We asked participants to consider these ‘nodes’ and whether their research could be described in these terms. Over the year, we have refined them, and are keen to continue the discussion!

The theme of ‘regulation of language’ is perhaps better described as ‘harmonizing and/or improving the regulation of language’, i.e. a critical and applied orientation rather than a descriptive, typological orientation to language policy. In addition, our recent ALS panel’s discussant, the Hon. Peter Gray, suggested we drill down into types of legal policy: policies about the legal system and courts; administrative rules and processes; and legislation are distinct from one another not only in their forms but also in their agents, their motivations, and their responsiveness to linguistic diversity and linguistic research.

We opted for an interactive workshop approach at the inaugural symposium. The interactive sessions included discussions of how to conceptualize this emerging research field, debates, challenges and solutions in our research and teaching, and a ‘collaboration fair’. In the collaboration fair, participants could propose questions, events or publications on which they would like to collaborate, and ‘sign up’ to cooperate in others’ requests, then talk immediately to each other about these collaborations. After the symposium, we migrated all the suggested projects and expressions of interest into a shared online folder, so that attendees could go back, and new LLIRN members could join in by adding themselves or contacting others who had expressed a shared interest. Another LLIRNing from the year is that people engage in developing these links with one another far better in person than online, so another symposium is in store for 2020!

2019 has shown us that there is a particular interest in LLIRN amongst Higher Degree Research students and Early Career Researchers. The network is beginning to show its value as a platform to develop mentoring, and its potential to create postgraduate research supervision opportunities. In fact, it has been very gratifying to us to have become ad hoc mentors to researchers even earlier in their careers than us who have approached us through the network. Many of these members report not having known that anyone else was pursuing the overlap of law and linguistics in which they, themselves, had developed an interest. Having a group identity and receiving recommendations and introductions through our members is so valuable given that this intersecting research area is not always well known or represented.

Ongoing challenges for LLIRN include how to communicate our research to key stakeholders in other research disciplines or beyond academia. Given our disparate approaches and the need to work within existing institutional structures, we continue to seek innovative ways to collaborate and share our knowledge and successes with each other and with those whom our work could benefit or should influence. We cannot over-emphasize the importance of events and activities that demonstrate or discuss sharing knowledge with researchers from a range of disciplines.

So please join us at https://mailman.sydney.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/law_linguistics_network to propose collaborative publications and presentations, promote new law and linguistics research, and meet LLIRNers from around the world!

Professor Simon Handley, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences, congratulates our HDR Excellence Award winners

The year ends on a final high note for our team with three awards testifying to the excellence of the higher degree research (HDR) conducted by our team.

Dr Hanna Torsh received the 2019 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis “Between pride and shame: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia from the perspective of the English-dominant partner”. The Michael Clyne Prize has been awarded annually since 2008 by the Australian Linguistics Society in recognition of the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact.

Hanna’s research, which has just been published as a book by Palgrave Macmillan, investigates the tensions between English monolingualism and multilingualism in bilingual couples and Australian society more generally. She shows that, on the one hand, linguistic diversity is practically subjugated to monolingual English-centric norms. On the other hand, discourses which valorise LOTEs and multilingualism are widely cherished as symbolic of tolerance.

This is the third time the Michael Clyne Prize has gone to a member of the Language-on-the-Move team: the 2017 award went to Dr Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, the 2012 award to Dr Donna Butorac, and Dr Vera Williams Tetteh was the 2016 runner-up. Read up on these previous winners here.

Hanna’s book Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame was launched by Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller at this week’s annual conference of the Australian Linguistics Society and joins a growing number of monographs published by members of our team.

So much fun launching “Linguistic #intermarriage in #Australia” by @HannaTorsh As befits the @Lg_on_the_Move team, author and launcher are already moving on to the next project … “Life in a new #language” coming soon #AusLingSoc2019 https://t.co/Gyt8Wl4MKu pic.twitter.com/JIcCmOGmZc

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 11, 2019

Dr Laura Smith-Khan won the Faculty of Human Sciences HDR Excellence Award for her PhD research about credibility in Australian refugee visa decision making and public discourse.

Laura’s thesis, which can be downloaded here, is a multi-level critical discourse analysis examining the discourse on refugee credibility in Australian media and public debates and visa review decision making. Drawing on newspaper reporting, public statements, procedural guidance and review decisions, it explores how dominant discourse conceptualizes credibility. It identifies discursive constructions of language, communication and diversity, and challenges these by contrasting them with the sociolinguistic realities. It finds that the discourse problematically presents credibility as an individual attribute of the refugee, and erases the effects of interactional context, legal and institutional structures, and discourse itself, on credibility construction.

Hanna and Laura both received their PhDs at a most memorable graduation ceremony in April this year, where Laura’s son stole the show:

Watch the adorable moment Dr @LauraSKh, from @MQLinguistics, welcomes an unexpected visitor on stage while delivering her #graduation ceremony speech. #mymq #mumlife #phdlife #AcademicTwitter pic.twitter.com/R6oUetj8vG

— Macquarie University (@Macquarie_Uni) April 23, 2019

And it is not only our PhDs who excel but our Master of Research students keenly follow in their footsteps: Samar Alkhalil won the Executive Dean’s Master of Research Thesis Award 2019 for her research about the promotion of English in Saudi Arabia.

The thesis, which can be downloaded here, examined the persuasion strategies and the ideological assumptions in a corpus of advertisements for private English Language Teaching institutes in Saudi Arabia. Findings revealed that the institutes attempt to persuade their potential audience to enroll by conceptualizing English as a global language. The advertisements also construct English learning as fun, personally empowering, and confidence-enhancing.

Samar is now building on her Masters research in her ongoing PhD research.

Congratulations, Hanna, Laura, and Samar! Your achievements are testament to the importance of team work and we are so proud of Language on the Move!

And if you want to find out the secrets behind our HDR successes, Laura spills the tea here.

References

Crock, M., Smith-Khan, L., McCallum, R., & Saul, B. (2017). The Legal Protection of Refugees with Disabilities: Forgotten and Invisible? Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Different in the Same Way? Language, Diversity, and Refugee Credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law, 29(3), 389-416.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua, 36(1), 31-57.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society, 28(5), 512-534.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019). Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society, 48(3), 403-427.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 4-36.
Torsh, H. (2020). Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.