The team behind the Language-on-the-Move Podcast (Image credit: Language on the Move)

Final piece of good news for the year before we head into a publishing break over January: we’ve just heard that the Language-on-the-Move Podcast has won the 2025 Talkley Award

The Talkley Award is issued by the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) and “celebrates the best piece or collection of linguistics communication produced in the previous year by current ALS members. The Award acknowledges that the discipline of linguistics needs champions to promote linguistics in the public sphere and explain how linguistic evidence can be used to solve real-life language problems.”

This is a wonderful end-of-year present for our team in recognition of the work and care we’re putting into creating the podcast. Special thanks and congratulations also to our podcast publishing partner, the New Books Network.

After the 2012 Talkley Award went to Ingrid Piller for the Language on the Move website, this is the second time the award goes to our team – an amazing recognition of the long-term impact Language on the Move has had on public communications about linguistic diversity and social justice.

Thank you to all our supporters who nominated us for the award! Special thanks to Dr Yixi (Isabella) Qiu and her students in the Guohao College Future Technology Program at Tongji University. After using the Language-on-the-Move Podcast as a learning resource, they have been among our biggest fans

To celebrate with us, listen to an episode today! You an find your list of choice below.

As always, please support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Students of the Guohao College Future Technology Program at Tongji University in Shanghai are among the fans of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast (Image credit: Dr Yixi (Isabella) Qiu)

List of episodes to date

1. Episode 64: Your Languages are your superpower! Agnes Bodis in conversation with Cindy Valdez (17/11/2025)
2. Episode 63: Australia’s National Indigenous Languages Survey: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zoe Avery (28/10/2025)
3. Episode 62: Migration is about every human challenge you can have: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shaun Tan (17/09/2025)
4. Episode 61: Cold Rush: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Sari Pietikainen (09/09/2025)
5. Episode 60: Sexual predation and English language teaching: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Vaughan Rapatahana (02/09/2025)
6. Episode 59: Intercultural Communication – Now in the 3^rd edition: Loy Lising in conversation with Ingrid Piller (26/08/2025)
7. Episode 58: Erased voices and unspoken heritage: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Zozan Balci (20/08/2025)
8. Episode 57: The Social Impact of Automating Translation: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ester Monzó-Nebot (03/08/2025)
9. Episode 56: Multilingual practices and monolingual mindsets: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (18/07/2025)
10. Episode 55: Improving quality of care for patients with limited English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Leah Karliner (26/06/2025)
11. Episode 54: Chinese in Qatar: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Sara Hillman (19/06/2025)
12. Episode 53: Accents, complex identities, and politics: Brynn Quick in conversation with Nicole Holliday (12/06/2025)
13. Episode 52: Is beach safety signage fit for purpose? Agnes Bodis in conversation with Masaki Shibata (05/06/2025)
14. Episode 51: The case for ASL instruction for hearing heritage signers: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Su Kyong Isakson (28/04/2025)
15. Episode 50: Researching language and digital communication: Brynn Quick in conversation with Christian Ilbury (22/04/2025)
16. Episode 49: Gestures and emblems: Brynn Quick in conversation with Lauren Gawne (14/04/2025)
17. Episode 48: Lingua Napoletana and language oppression: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Massimiliano Canzanella (07/04/2025)
18. Episode 47: Teaching international students: Brynn Quick in conversation with Agnes Bodis and Jing Fan (31/03/2025)
19. Episode 46: Intercultural competence in the digital age: Brynn Quick in conversation with Amy McHugh (12/03/2025)
20. Episode 45: How does multilingual law-making work: Alexandra Grey in conversation with Karen McAuliffe (05/03/2025)
21. Episode 44: Educational inequality in Fijian higher education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Prashneel Goundar (25/02/2025)
22. Episode 43: Multilingual crisis communication: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Li Jia (22/01/2025)
23. Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
24. Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
25. Episode 40: Language Rights in a Changing China: Brynn Quick in conversation with Alexandra Grey (01/01/2025)
26. Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan (24/12/2024)
27. Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White (18/12/2024)
28. Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle (20/11/2024)
29. Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger (17/11/2024)
30. Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl (02/11/2024)
31. Episode 34: How did Arabic get on that sign? Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Rizwan Ahmad (30/10/2024)
32. Episode 33: Migration, constraints and suffering: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Marco Santello (14/10/2024)
33. Episode 32: Living together across borders: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Lynnette Arnold (07/10/2024)
34. Episode 31: Police first responders interacting with domestic violence victims: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Kate Steel (29/09/2024)
35. Episode 30: Remembering Barbara Horvath: Livia Gerber in conversation with Barbara Horvath (10/09/2024)
36. Episode 29: English Language Ideologies in Korea: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (08/09/2024)
37. Episode 28: Sign Language Brokering: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jemina Napier (30/07/2024)
38. Episode 27: Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt (24/07/2024)
39. Episode 26: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell (17/07/2024)
40. Episode 25: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising (11/07/2024)
41. Episode 24: Language policy at an abortion clinic: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ella van Hest (05/07/2024)
42. Episode 23: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari (03/07/2024)
43. Episode 22: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh (27/06/2024)
44. Episode 21: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller (19/06/2024)
45. Episode 20: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac (12/06/2024)
46. Episode 19: Because Internet: Brynn Quick in conversation with Gretchen McCulloch (03/06/2024)
47. Episode 18: Between Deaf and hearing cultures: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jessica Kirkness (01/06/2024)
48. Episode 17: The Rise of English: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Rosemary Salomone (21/05/2024)
49. Episode 16: Community Languages Schools Transforming Education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Joe Lo Bianco (07/05/2024)
50. Episode 15: Shanghai Multilingualism Alliance: Yixi (Isabella) Qiu in conversation with Yongyan Zheng (02/05/2024)
51. Episode 14: Multilingual Commanding Urgency from Garbage to COVID-19: Brynn Quick in conversation with Michael Chestnut (27/04/2024)
52. Episode 13: Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson (13/04/2024)
53. Episode 12: History of Modern Linguistics: Ingrid Piller in conversation with James McElvenny (10/04/2024)
54. Episode 11: 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jasna Novak Milić (08/04/2024
55. Episode 10: Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital: Brynn Quick in conversation with Erin Mulpur, Houston Methodist Hospital (26/03/2024)
56. Episode 9: Interpreting service provision is good value for money. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jim Hlavac (19/03/2024)
57. Episode 8: What does it mean to govern a multilingual society well? Hanna Torsh in conversation with Alexandra Grey (22/02/2024)
58. Episode 7: What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Piers Kelly (21/02/2024; originally published 2020)
59. Episode 6: How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world. Carla Chamberlin and Mak Khan in conversation with Ingrid Piller (20/02/2024; originally published 2020)
60. Episode 5: Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (19/02/2024; originally published 2021)
61. Episode 4: Language makes the place. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Adam Jaworski (18/02/2024; originally published 2022)
62. Episode 3: Linguistic diversity in education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Ingrid Gogolin (17/02/2024; originally published 2023)
63. Episode 2: Translanguaging: Loy Lising in conversation with Ofelia García (16/02/2024; originally published 2023)
64. Episode 1: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (15/02/2024)

The president of University of Hamburg, Prof Dr Hauke Heekeren, welcomes the new members of Ingrid Piller’s Humboldt Professorship Team

Attentive readers will remember that in May this year we advertised six doctoral and postdoctoral positions to conduct research related to “Linguistic Diversity and Social Participation across the Lifespan” in the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center at University of Hamburg, as part of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship awarded to Ingrid Piller.

In response, we received 270 applications. While it was exciting to see that there is so much interest in our work, it was also heart-breaking to have to make so many tough decisions from an amazing pool of highly qualified candidates.

After conducting Zoom and on-campus interviews in July and August, I am now pleased to report that the Dream Team has started their work at the beginning of November. We have six extremely talented and accomplished early career researchers joining the Language-on-the-Move community, and in this post, they are introducing themselves in their own words.

Jenia Yudytska

I’m Jenia Yudytska, a Ukrainian-Austrian postdoc. I did my PhD in computational sociolinguistics at the University of Hamburg, investigating the influence of technological affordances on language in online communication. My current research interest focuses on how migrants use language technologies, particularly machine translation, as a resource in their everyday life. Since 2022, I have also been heavily involved in the organisation of grassroots mutual aid online communities for Ukrainian forced migrants in Austria.

I’m particularly excited for this chance to jump into applied linguistics, and the chance to combine both my love for research and my desire to make a social impact!

Juan Sánchez

¡Hola!

I’m Juan Felipe Sánchez Guzmán, a Colombian student and researcher based in Hamburg. In my home country, I conducted research on gender diversity and language teaching, as well as on the implementation of the Colombian Ministry of Education’s bilingualism programs involving foreign tutors in public institutions within a predominantly monolingual context. Building on my passion for languages, my own migration experience, and those of fellow immigrants, my Master’s research explored the integration of Latinx nurses into the German healthcare system.

I look forward to showcasing through research the values and strengths that multilingual communities bring to education, healthcare, and society as a whole.

Mara Kyrou

My name is Mara Kyrou and I hold an MA degree in Linguistics and Communication from the University of Amsterdam. My Masters research explored language policies, practices and ideologies as perceived by teaching professionals in multilingual non-formal education settings in Greece and the Netherlands. My research interests also include professional and intercultural communication in transnational work contexts, gender theory and theater education. I have also contributed to the design and implementation of language learning programs for students with a (post-)migrant background with international NGOs.

In this research group we are working with (auto-)ethnographies and focusing on globally emerging topics hence we don’t just study things as they are but as we humans are.

Martin Derince

Roj baş!

I am Martin Serif Derince. I carried out my PhD research on Kurdish heritage language education in Germany at the University of Potsdam. I have conducted research and have publications on bilingualism and multilingualism in education, language policy, heritage language education, statelessness, and family multilingualism. After long years of professional work in municipality, non-governmental organizations and community associations dedicated to promoting multilingualism in various contexts, I am excited to explore new terrains in academia, grow together intellectually, and contribute to efforts for social transformation and justice.

Nicole Marinaro

My name is Nicole Marinaro, and I did my PhD at Belfast’s Ulster University’s School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, focusing on addressing communication difficulties between patients and healthcare professionals. My research interests include language policy, sociolinguistics and linguistic justice, with a focus on the inclusion of linguistically diverse speakers. I am also passionate about language teaching and dissemination of academic knowledge.

I am particularly excited to become part of a diverse and interdisciplinary team, to learn from each other over the next years and to make a real contribution to a more linguistically just society.

Olga Vlasova

My name is Olga Vlasova. My research journey started in Prague at the Charles University where I obtained my BA degree in sociology. Later, I completed my Master’s degree in social policy at the University of Bremen and University of Amsterdam. During these years I have been contributing to research in the fields of migration and labour studies, with a particular focus on solidarity practices with migrant workers in the European labour markets. Apart from that, I’m a passionate volunteer and help newcomers with their integration into Hamburg society.

One thing my life journey has taught me is: “Be brave and follow your ideas and passions!”

What’s next?

Over the next 4 years, our work will be in the following five areas:

• We will conduct a set of interlinked ethnographies to better understand linguistic diversity and social participation across the lifespan
• We will make a novel methodological and epistemological contribution related to qualitative multilingual data sharing
• We will build capacity in international networked education research (see also WERA IRN Literacy in Multilingual Contexts)
• We will work with community stakeholders to help improve language policies and practices and make institutional communication more accessible
• We will share knowledge and contribute to a greater valorization of linguistic diversity

Along the way, we will keep you all posted, of course. Watch this space!

Early next year, we will also advertise another researcher position on our team so that’s another reason to follow our work

Related content

Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship Awards 2025

Tazin and Brynn, two of our enthusiastic podcast hosts

Editor’s note: Time flies: the Language-on-the-Move Podcast in collaboration with the New Books Network just turned one! Time to celebrate and reflect!

We celebrate a passionate team of hosts who created 43 insightful episodes about language in social life which have been downloaded 57,000 times across a range of platforms.

By download numbers, our top-5 episodes were:

1. Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt
2. Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko
3. Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche
4. Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson
5. Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko

Providing a service to our communities by sharing knowledge about intercultural communication, language learning and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization is a key benefit of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast.

Another benefit accrues to our hosts who get to chat with key thinkers in our field. In this post, two of our hosts, Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah, share their reflections on the occasion of our 1st birthday. Enjoy and here’s to many more milestones!

***
Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah
***

Over the past year, many of us on the Language on the Move Team have been excitedly hosting podcasts about a wide range of topics in language and social life! As we dive into recording and producing our podcasts for the year ahead, we would like to share why this continues to be a rich and rewarding experience for us as PhD students at the beginning of our research journeys.

1. Wider horizons: Sounds cliché but oh, so true! Each time we host a podcast, we spend a significant amount of time doing background research. We research our guests, their interests, and their work. The opportunity created for reading is amazing. Not only do we dip our toes into the vast ocean that is all things language, we learn new things to enhance our own research and add to our reference lists!
2. Bigger networks: We establish relationships with our guests and connect with others in their networks. Our guests are great – they stay in touch! As the podcast is promoted on various platforms, we make connections with linguists around the world and are able to remain updated on developments in our field and directions that different researchers are taking.
3. Informal mentors: Did we mention our guests are great? Our guests indulge us in lively and interesting conversations not just during the podcast but also off air. Every guest shares their experiences, offers us advice and stays open to us reaching out if we have any questions on their area of expertise or if we need to understand some part of the academic journey.
4. Technical skills: Who knew how much work goes into the editing and production of a podcast episode? But this has also been a great learning experience, dabbling with technology and learning the ins and outs of various platforms – another transferable skill for emerging researchers.
5. Successful collaboration: The podcast is just one more example of how collaboration between fellow researchers results in an overall increase in both productivity and learning. Many times, we have reflected amongst ourselves about the way our podcast works. We support, mentor and acknowledge each other and, like a feel-good movie, are left wanting to collaborate some more.
6. Future collaborations: And yes, it has opened doors for us to future collaborations, to be able to reach out through our now wider networks and pursue our wide-ranging interests in linguistics and adjacent disciplines.
7. Non-traditional research outputs: Finally, what we love looking at – our updated research output lists every time a podcast drops! And an added bonus for those of us who prefer talking about research rather than writing about it, this format speaks right to us! As non-traditional research outputs, podcasts have offered us a practical way for us to engage with our learning in real-world settings, to use and develop our various skills, and contribute to research at the same time.

We give our podcast hosting experience a 5-star rating! If you enjoy the Language on the Move podcasts, please leave us a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language-on-the-Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Full list of episodes published to date

1. Episode 43: Multilingual crisis communication: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Li Jia (22/01/2025)
2. Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
3. Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
4. Episode 40: Language Rights in a Changing China: Brynn Quick in conversation with Alexandra Grey (01/01/2025)
5. Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan (24/12/2024)
6. Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White (18/12/2024)
7. Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle (20/11/2024)
8. Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger (17/11/2024)
9. Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl (02/11/2024)
10. Episode 34: How did Arabic get on that sign? Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Rizwan Ahmad (30/10/2024)
11. Episode 33: Migration, constraints and suffering: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Marco Santello (14/10/2024)
12. Episode 32: Living together across borders: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Lynnette Arnold (07/10/2024)
13. Episode 31: Police first responders interacting with domestic violence victims: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Kate Steel (29/09/2024)
14. Episode 30: Remembering Barbara Horvath: Livia Gerber in conversation with Barbara Horvath (10/09/2024)
15. Episode 29: English Language Ideologies in Korea: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (08/09/2024)
16. Episode 28: Sign Language Brokering: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jemina Napier (30/07/2024)
17. Episode 27: Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt (24/07/2024)
18. Episode 26: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell (17/07/2024)
19. Episode 25: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising (11/07/2024)
20. Episode 24: Language policy at an abortion clinic: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ella van Hest (05/07/2024)
21. Episode 23: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari (03/07/2024)
22. Episode 22: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh (27/06/2024)
23. Episode 21: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller (19/06/2024)
24. Episode 20: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac (12/06/2024)
25. Episode 19: Because Internet: Brynn Quick in conversation with Gretchen McCulloch (03/06/2024)
26. Episode 18: Between Deaf and hearing cultures: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jessica Kirkness (01/06/2024)
27. Episode 17: The Rise of English: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Rosemary Salomone (21/05/2024)
28. Episode 16: Community Languages Schools Transforming Education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Joe Lo Bianco (07/05/2024)
29. Episode 15: Shanghai Multilingualism Alliance: Yixi (Isabella) Qui in conversation with Yongyan Zheng (02/05/2024)
30. Episode 14: Multilingual Commanding Urgency from Garbage to COVID-19: Brynn Quick in conversation with Michael Chestnut (27/04/2024)
31. Episode 13: Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson (13/04/2024)
32. Episode 12: History of Modern Linguistics: Ingrid Piller in conversation with James McElvenny (10/04/2024)
33. Episode 11: 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jasna Novak Milić (08/04/2024
34. Episode 10: Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital: Brynn Quick in conversation with Erin Mulpur, Houston Methodist Hospital (26/03/2024)
35. Episode 9: Interpreting service provision is good value for money. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jim Hlavac (19/03/2024)
36. Episode 8: What does it mean to govern a multilingual society well? Hanna Torsh in conversation with Alexandra Grey (22/02/2024)
37. Episode 7: What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Piers Kelly (21/02/2024; originally published 2020)
38. Episode 6: How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world. Carla Chamberlin and Mak Khan in conversation with Ingrid Piller (20/02/2024; originally published 2020)
39. Episode 5: Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (19/02/2024; originally published 2021)
40. Episode 4: Language makes the place. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Adam Jaworski (18/02/2024; originally published 2022)
41. Episode 3: Linguistic diversity in education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Ingrid Gogolin (17/02/2024; originally published 2023)
42. Episode 2: Translanguaging: Loy Lising in conversation with Ofelia García (16/02/2024; originally published 2023)
43. Episode 1: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (15/02/2024)

The interview explores the Alliance’s origins, research themes, and future directions. The episode not only highlights the significant contributions of this dynamic research group but also provides a glimpse into the personal and professional journeys that have shaped this academic endeavor.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Further reading

Li, C., Shen, Q., Zhao, K., & Zheng, Y. (2022). The Shanghai alliance of multilingual researchers: Fudan University, Tongji University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Shanghai International Studies University, China. Language Teaching, 55(4), 583-587. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444821000379

Transcript

Yixi (Isabella) and Yongyan present about language management in global corporations

Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Yixi Qiu. You can call me Isabella.

I’m a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics in Fudan University, Shanghai, China. I’m also a member of the Language on the Move team. My guest today is Professor Yongyan Zheng, a full professor at the College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, where she teaches English academic writing and applied linguistics.

Her research interests include second language development, bilingual and multilingual education, and academic literacy practices. She is the editor-in-chief of Language, Culture, and Curriculum, and also the co-editor-in-chief of System. She is a leading scholar in the Shanghai Alliance of Multilingual Researchers. In today’s interview, we will focus on this Shanghai Alliance of Multilingual Researchers, talking about the motivations behind the Alliance, its key research themes, and some of the methodological innovations that the Alliance has pioneered. Welcome to the show, Professor Zheng.

Zheng: Thank you, Isabella, for having me today.

Bella: Could you please start us off by telling us a little bit about this Shanghai Alliance, its members, and its main focus?

Zheng: Yes. We are a group of scholars from four leading universities in Shanghai, especially the northeast part of Shanghai, including Fudan University, Tongji University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Shanghai International Studies University. We’ve been working together for over 15 years already, and our focus is on the role of multilingualism in China’s unique cultural and educational landscape. Now, our team includes about 10 core researchers, and we are also currently guiding around 30 master’s students, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers. Our work covers three main areas, multilingualism in language education, its influence in Chinese society, and the research methods we use to explore these topics.

Bella: Well, thank you very much for the introduction, Professor Zheng. Now, I’m quite curious about the origins of this Shanghai Alliance. What motivated you and other members to establish this group?

Zheng: The idea for the Alliance actually started from personal connections and shared interests among leading scholars. We are, me, of course, and then Professor Qi Shen from Tongji University, Professor Ziting Li from Shanghai International Studies University, and Professor Ke Zhao at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. We actually are friends in our life, and Professor Li and Professor Zhao and I, we went to the same PhD program, and so our friendship goes way back. But then we work together, and especially our universities are quite close to each other, so we believe in knowledge construction, we share common interests in exploring multilingualism.

Then we say, why don’t we just start our own alliance? Well, there is a little story here. When we first started, we didn’t call ourselves Shanghai Alliance, but gradually, through our practice, we realized that we were doing something really significant. Originally, we wanted to call ourselves Wujiaochang Alliance, because Wujiaochang, namely the Pentagon Square, is where the four universities are located. But then we thought probably Shanghai Alliance, this name is easier to remember, and here we go.

Bella: Okay, thank you very much, and especially thank you very much for telling us the story behind this group. Could you please share the core philosophy behind Shanghai Alliance? How do you personally view its role and impact of this alliance?

Zheng: Yes, so as I mentioned before, we believe in collaboration, we believe in sharing our research, and particularly because we are doing multilingualism, we believe in the concept of researching multilingually.

So this approach was actually proposed by Professor Prue Holmes and her colleagues at Durham University UK, but then we believe that this approach is also suitable for our own research agenda. This approach encourages the use of multiple languages in the entire process of doing research, from idea generation, data analysis, interpretation, knowledge dissemination. So this approach enables us to orchestrate diverse linguistic and intellectual as well as cultural resources to cover a broader range of topics and break free from the constraints of single language research traditions.

Personally, I think this alliance is especially driven by the philosophy of researching multilingually as a transformative force in the field of applied linguistics, because it allows us to pull our resources together, our ideas, expertise, methodological repertoires together, not only to enhance our collective understanding of multilingualism, but more importantly, to impact how multilingualism is studied and understood in Chinese society.

Bella: Thank you very much for sharing the philosophy behind this group, and researching multilingually is indeed impressive, as it emphasizes the process rather than just the outcome, and emphasizing the cooperation and the growth that can be the most rewarding aspects of studying multilingualism. I have the personal experience in that aspect as well.

And as we discuss how multilingualism is studied and understood in society, you mentioned earlier three main areas of focus within the alliance, and could you please introduce about the multilingualism in education, how do you approach multilingualism in language education in your alliance? Y

Zheng: Yes, of course. The main concern or the very first impetus for me to put my emphasis on multilingualism in language education was the realization that there was too much emphasis on English, despite the fact that I was an English professor. So, our work in this area wants to look at language in education planning at a macro as well as the meso level, and we also want to explore the lived experiences of multilingual teachers and learners at different levels.

For instance, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Andy Gao from the University of New South Wales, and we together co-guest edited a special issue entitled Multilingualism and Higher Education in Greater China, for the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development back in 2019. This special issue was very well received by the readers, and some of the articles were still highly cited even until today. So, then our interest actually expanded to not only the lived experiences of students, but also to the meso level language planning.

Researchers such as Dr Xiuwen Chen, Professor Ke Zhao, and Dr Jian Tao from the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics have conducted a series of studies in the context of China’s national initiative to diversify foreign language education. Me, myself, and also my PhD students have also explored how an elective Arabic program was successfully implemented at Fudan University. So, these initiatives have some social impact on the learning experiences of our students as well.

Another focus is teacher development, because we believe that teacher development or teacher in-service training is also a critical component of our multilingual education planning. So, researchers in our alliance have launched various projects aimed at supporting multilingual teachers’ development, particularly in response to the huge pressure of the university research assessment system.

Bella: Thank you so much for the detailed introduction to the first theme. Let’s move forward then. I think we are particularly curious about the next focus area. I think it’s the multilingualism in Chinese society. How does this alliance explore the complexities of multilingualism in China?

Zheng: The second theme is related to another strand, language policy and planning and the sociolinguistics or let’s say the sociology of language that we have been focusing on. This strand is particularly featured by Professor Qi Shen and his team at Tongji University. They have been very productive in this area, particularly through their work over the past five years.

Back in 2019, Professor Shen and Professor Andy Gao also guest-edited a special issue entitled Multilingualism and Policymaking in Greater China, Ideological and Implementation Spaces for the Journal Language Policy. This special issue was also highly cited. So, they explored the notion of resource orientation and then they want to see how this notion allows various stakeholders to negotiate language policies which could help preserve linguistic diversity within China’s tradition of linguistic unity.

Bella: Yes, that sounds like a critical exploration of policy that could actually shape the future language policy and planning in significant ways.

Zheng: Yes, right. We hope so. And at the micro level, our research explores family language planning. We’ve looked at ethnic male families in southwest China, ethnic Korean migrant families in Shanghai, urban families of varying socioeconomic statuses. So, our studies highlight the intricate interplay of family dynamics, socioeconomic factors, language practices and identity against the backdrop of China’s modernization, urbanization and globalization.

And currently, we’re also examining Chinese transnational families in the USA, in Latin America as well as Arabic families doing business in China. We want to explore topics including heritage language maintenance, adolescence bilingual identity construction, parental agency as well as language ideologies. We believe that these topics are highly insignificant for us to understand the linguistic diversity and how people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds can equally participate in social affairs.

Bella: Yeah, indeed. And it’s really fascinating to see such a wide range of research areas that you mentioned. And then how about the third strand? The third strand is about multilingualism in the workplace.

Zheng: We are studying how multinational corporations in China manage language policies and practices. For instance, Professor Ke Zhao and her team at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics have analyzed a Spanish bank’s language management in Shanghai, the complex language dynamics in foreign banks against the changing context of foreign direct investment. And they also explored corporate language capacity at a German IT multinational company in Shanghai.

So, they emphasized the crucial role of middle-level management in designing and implementing language-related activities to support the goal of developing corporate language competence. I believe this strand is also related to the focus, the economic and financial focus of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. And nowadays, Professor Ke Zhao and her team are also focusing on the language or the corporate language capacity building of Chinese corporations which want to go overseas. So, I believe that this is an interesting, under-explored area in social linguistics.

Bella: Wow, thank you for outlining how the second theme is approached in the alliance, with each member bringing their unique focus. Given the innovative approaches you’ve mentioned, our audience might be eager to learn more about the research methodologies utilized by the alliance. Could you elaborate on some of these methodological innovations used in this alliance?

Zheng: Yes, we believe that methodological innovations are indispensable for pushing the boundaries of theoretical development. So, guided by this kind of spirit, our group places a strong emphasis on pioneering qualitative research methods. For instance, my colleagues and I are the first batch of Chinese researchers who use the Q methodology in applied linguistics.

This method has proven useful in offering a systematic and a comprehensive exploration of subjectivity. So, we have already published a lot on Q methodology. For example, on a modern language journal, language teaching research, and also a journal of multilingual and multicultural development.

If you’re interested, you’re very welcome to check our publications on those journals. Additionally, we explore the use of social network analysis. For example, Professor Ziting Li from Shanghai International Studies University combines this social network analysis with ethnographic methods to study the pragmatic choices of international students in China.

Currently, Li and her team are applying different social network analysis techniques in their projects. One focuses on how multilingual STEM doctoral students from Africa and South America construct their personal networks to support their academic endeavors in China. And the other project examines the interaction between various types of support and personal network development in enhancing Chinese language teachers’ professional capacities.

Bella: I’m truly impressed by the theoretical and especially methodological advancements achieved by the alliance. And building on this, could you please explain how this alliance, this Shanghai alliance, promotes and shares its research and findings both within the academic community and with the wider public?

Zheng: The alliance is committed to advancing research methods on multilingualism among Chinese researchers. And equally important, we are committed to training early career researchers who are interested in doing multilingual research in Chinese contexts.

So we have already hosted eight language studies forums for emerging scholars since 2015. The most recent forum focused on English medium instruction in emerging contexts and attracted around 2,000 participants online. We have also invited distinguished scholars like Professor Li Wei from UCL, Professor Zhu Hua from UCL to conduct workshops on multilingualism and academic writing.

These events were offered mostly free to Chinese researchers. And we have also three social media accounts that share research insights and they have already gathered more than 20,000 subscribers. The upcoming forum, we call it the language studies forum for emerging scholars, the upcoming one will be held in early July.

That will be the ninth forum in a row. We hold this kind of forum every year. So this year’s topic is linguistic landscape and multilingual education. We believe that this would also be a very interesting topic to explore in the Chinese higher education as well as basic education contexts.

Bella: Thank you very much and thank you for sharing the information on the upcoming event, especially the July activity. And I’m very much looking forward to participating in this productive event. And before we wrap up, could you please tell us what’s next for the Alliance? Where is this amazing community headed?

Zheng: Yes, absolutely. We will continue to focus on three main research themes and further innovate our methodological approaches. For example, we are currently enhancing our use of social networks as both a theoretical framework and an analytical tool to investigate the various aspects of multilingualism.

Our team is also advancing the use of other innovative methods like qualitative comparative analysis, QCA, and more data-driven natural language processing techniques to study language policy and planning. These techniques are crucial as we explore patterns in language and education planning and language management across educational institutions and transnational families.

Bella: Thank you. I love those ideas. It’s absolutely amazing to see the techniques expanding and developing. Thank you very much, Professor Yongyan Zheng, for speaking with us today. We really appreciate it. And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time.

Loy is perfectly placed to model this balance, as she was recently recognized with a 2022 Lighthouse Award for a staff member who, in an exemplary fashion, models the values of the Faculty of Medicine, Health, and Human Sciences at Macquarie University.

***

So proud of the special issue of Multilingua devoted to family language policy I guest-edited together with supportive colleagues

Balancing academic responsibilities of teaching, research, and service has become increasingly challenging under conditions of social acceleration. Of course, academics are not alone in having to deal with the speeding up of our lives under neoliberal capitalism, as I showed in a study with Filipino migrant workers in Australia.

Three of the key strategies I use to keep everything together while inspiring students and achieving excellence with grace are:

1. I always remember that as academics we are first and foremost teachers, so our main role is to inspire minds and hearts.
2. I strive to create synergies in my work by making sure my tasks and roles align with my passion and skills.
3. I surround myself with like-minded colleagues who can do the work with me and can spur me on to achieve our individual and collective goals.

In the following, I will show what I achieved in 2022 guided by these principles.

Teaching to inspire minds and hearts

One of the units I convene is “Professional and Community Engagement (PACE).” PACE is one of the hallmarks of a Macquarie University’s education. It places students in a work environment so that they can gain professional experience.

PACE provides students with an opportunity to experience a work environment and enhance their employability. Academics also derive benefits, as PACE provides a platform to connect research and teaching. In 2021, when I first convened this unit, I started an initiative where I invited colleagues in my department and beyond to host PACE students to work with them on their research.

In addition to organizing the work experience for all Linguistics students in our Department, I hosted six students this year, who were interested in finding out how sociolinguistic research is conducted. Together, we worked on a corpus study of migrant English in the media. This provided the students with an appreciation of what sociolinguistic research entails and constituted valuable research assistance for me.

Maybe some of my PACE students will progress to undertaking research degrees. Supervising higher degree research is another of my passions, where I achieve synergies between teaching and research.

Heritage language maintenance in Australia

As with teaching, collaboration is at the heart of my research endeavors.

One of my key publications this year was a special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Multilingual family language policy in monolingual Australia: multilingual desires and monolingual realities,” which I co-edited with my colleague, Dr Hanna Torsh.

This publication has a long history – and patience is another academic virtue! – and goes back to 2019. Back then, I was awarded a small research grant by the Australian Linguistics Society (ALS) for a research project entitled, “Understanding migrants’ multilingual practices: Evidence from Filipino families.” This project aimed to investigate heritage language maintenance practices of Filipino migrant families in Sydney.

On the back of data collection for the project, I co-hosted a themed panel devoted to “Linguistic diversity in Australian migrant families” at the 2019 ALS annual conference. The presentations at that panel eventually transformed into the articles that make up the special issue (for a full list of the contributions, see the reference below).

Sociolinguistics in Connection

Academic meetings are a great way to facilitate research collaborations, and as the outcome of the 2019 panel was published, we hosted another event that will hopefully lead to new research projects further down the track.

This event was a symposium devoted to “Sociolinguistics in connection: Towards a healthy and resilient society.” Funded by Macquarie University’s Linguistics Department’s Research Community Incubator Scheme, the symposium was intended to strengthen the Department’s applied sociolinguistics cluster.

Together with my co-organizers Dr Agi Bodis, Dr Jean Cho, A/Prof Peter Roger, and Dr Hanna Torsh we assembled around 30 colleagues from across the university and other universities in the Sydney region for an inspirational day of lightning talks and academic speed dating.

Snapping a group photo during the “Sociolinguistics in Connection” symposium

The aim of the symposium was to deepen and expand existing research strengths by providing a platform for colleagues from various disciplines who do research at the intersections of language, healthcare, and education in our linguistically diverse society.

Surrounding yourself with like-minded colleagues

In work as in life, it is essential that we surround ourselves with colleagues who support us and spur us on so we can become better versions of ourselves as researchers, teachers, and administrators. I have been very fortunate in my mentors, peers, and mentees. Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller has been a constant and consistent mentor and support in all my academic endeavors since 2008. She has also created the Language on the Move research group, which has inspired so many of us to conduct research that actually improves people’s lives.

I must also mention Emeritus Professor Pam Peters, who has supported my corpus linguistics research related to diverse Englishes, particularly in Australia and the Philippines.

Maintaining focus on students and community

I started off this blog post by saying that one of the challenges with working in today’s academia is balancing one’s teaching, research, and service duties. What this year’s endeavors and experiences have taught me is that if we remain focused on the heart of our profession – our students and our community – we will always be inspired to do more and do better.

References

Ellis, E. M., & Sims, M. (2022). “It’s like the root of a tree that I grew up from….”: parents’ linguistic identity shaping family language policy in isolated circumstances. Multilingua, 41(5), 529-548. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0100
Lising, L. (2021). ‘Speak English!’: social acceleration and language learning in the workplace. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2021.1955499
Lising, L. (2022). “I want her to be able to think in English”: challenges to heritage language maintenance in a monolingual society. Multilingua, 41(5), 549-569. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0106
Rubino, A. (2022). Family language policy and dialect-Italian dynamics: across the waves of Italo-Australian migrant families. Multilingua, 41(5), 571-589. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0095
Taylor-Leech, K. (2022). Transnational identities, being and belonging: the diverse home literacies of multilingual immigrant families. Multilingua, 41(5), 591-609. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0092
Torsh, H. I. (2022). ‘Maybe if you talk to her about it’: intensive mothering expectations and heritage language maintenance. Multilingua, 41(5), 611-628. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0105
Torsh, H. I., & Lising, L. (2022). Multilingual family language policy in monolingual Australia: multilingual desires and monolingual realities. Multilingua, 41(5), 519-527. doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0103

Each year Elsevier publishes the @Stanford list of the “World’s Top 2% Scientists" – this year's list just dropped and it includes 335 #linguists – want to know who they are? And what's good and bad about the list?
Quick on citation #metrics
1/10https://t.co/e3YyYA8nOq pic.twitter.com/JboVvkHfkW

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) October 16, 2022

The dataset

A couple of people have asked me where they can find the full list of the 335 most-cited linguists. So, I am making it available for download here. I extracted this table from the Ioannidis (2022) dataset based on the “subfield-1” code for “languages and linguistics”. That means, linguists who primarily publish in another discipline (e.g., psychology) are not included here.

Reference

Ioannidis, John P.A. (2022), “September 2022 data-update for “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators””, Mendeley Data, V4, doi: 10.17632/btchxktzyw.4

Related content

Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-to-challenge-anglocentricity-in-academic-publishing/
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). What exactly does an editor do? Multilingua. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0125
Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0034

Top-10 countries producing linguistics research (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

US- and UK-based scholars dominate linguistics

Global academic knowledge production is dominated by the Anglosphere. In Linguistics, for example, scholars based in the USA and UK produce more academic publications than scholars from the next eight top-10 countries combined. Not only do American and British scholars produce a lot more linguistics research than everybody else, their work is also much more influential as the comparatively high h-indexes of linguists from these countries indicate.

55% of the 100 most cited scholars under each of the keywords “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” with a Google Scholar profile are affiliated with a US or UK institution.[i] To put this figure in perspective: the population of the USA and UK together accounts for 5.12% of the global total. In other words, linguists from these two countries are massively overrepresented among the thought leaders in our field.

By contrast, not a single applied linguist or sociolinguist based at a university in Mainland China is among the 100 most highly cited scholars in “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics.” To put this figure in perspective: China accounts for 18.47% of the global population.

Challenging the Anglophone publication monopoly

Where the world’s most cited Applied Linguists and Sociolinguists are based, according to Google Scholar

For multilingual scholars, i.e. those with English as an additional language in their repertoire, particularly if they are based outside the Anglosphere, the stats above can be pretty demoralizing. Publication in “top-tier” journals and impact metrics have become central to hiring, promotion, and funding decisions in the neoliberal academy worldwide. Yet, despite the meritocratic rhetoric, the playing field is obviously far from level and multilingual scholars based in global peripheries labor “under a heavy mountain.”

The burden is intensified by the fact that academic publishing can very much look like a black box. While advice on how to get published abounds, what is missing are positive case-studies that showcase experiences of multilingual peripheral scholars challenging their linguistic and epistemic exclusion.

A look into the black box of academic publishing

In a new article titled “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production,” which has just been published in Multilingua, my colleagues Jenny Zhang, Jia Li and I provide precisely such a positive case study.

As regular readers of Language on the Move will remember, in 2020, we co-edited a special issue of the highly-ranked international sociolinguistics journal Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis.” To the best of our knowledge, this was the first concentrated effort in English to address the language and communication challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The special issue centered on research from the Chinese world.

The special issue has been widely read and is already well cited. In addition to its topical exploration, it also constitutes a contribution to intercultural dialogue in applied and sociolinguistics.

US and UK linguistics research has an overwhelming impact on the field (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

Reflecting on the process that led to the publication of the special issue, we felt that it contained several lessons for linguistic and epistemic justice in our field. In “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we make those lessons explicit in the form of a collaborative autoethnography that illuminates the process behind the product.

In the article, we reflect on enabling personal and academic networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. And we have three take-home messages.

Against the center vision of “global” academic knowledge

The dominant vision of linguistic research is solely focused on the central circuit of academic knowledge production. Efforts at global knowledge transfer almost always move outward from this central circuit. In this vision, sharing center knowledge with the periphery is considered transformational. By contrast, Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis demonstrated that some of the most exciting developments in contemporary applied sociolinguistics, such as the development of Chinese emergency language services, are located outside the center.

Knowledge flows in many directions and many circuits. Engaging with multi-directionality and multi-scalarity requires the kind of networks and teamwork we were able to bring to bear.

For community building and an ethics of care

Within circuits of knowledge production, peripheral multilingual knowledge producers are assigned seemingly perpetual status as international students, academic novices, visiting scholars, junior partners, and interlopers in center institutions. These positionings ultimately preclude deep engagement.

At this conference in Wuhan in 2012, we had no idea our friendship would lead to joint research on COVID-19 communication in 2020

The foundation of our joint work goes beyond academic collaboration and is based on longstanding personal friendship. We consider recognition of the affective dimensions of knowledge production and the importance of ethical relationships of care vital to the decolonization of knowledge.

Confronting privilege

Jenny, Li Jia, and I each write from different points in our career and from different points of inclusion and exclusion in various centers and peripheries. The same is true for all academics and each of us has a responsibility to center questions of linguistic and epistemic justice in whichever position we may find ourselves.

For us, this has involved building and engaging with various networks, collaborating across borders and generations, creating publication opportunities, and volunteering our time and expertise to act as linguistic and epistemic brokers.

Reference

To read our collaborative autoethnography about linguistic and epistemic justice in global academic publishing in full head over to Multilingua:

Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. 2022. Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. [free access]

Piller, Ingrid. Can we make intercultural communication less Anglo- and Eurocentric? Reflections on linguistic and epistemic justice. Keynote lecture at Re-Thinking Interculturalism, The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR) Europa Congress, May19-21, 2022

[i] As of April 17, 2021. This includes some duplicates as scholars who appear both under “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” were counted in each category.

As Pia says in the video, academic publishing is an insiders game. Her presentation was part of a workshop to demystify academic publishing for PhD students and early career researchers. This international workshop was hosted during the past two days by the Next Generation Literacies research network.

As academic publishing becomes increasingly subject to the gamification of metrics, Pia charges us not to lose sight of the fact that the point of publishing is sharing knowledge. Enjoy!

Image credit: Chris Montgomery via Unsplash

Language plays a central role in legal settings. The way linguistic diversity is conceptualized and accommodated can affect access to justice in a myriad ways and there is a plethora of linguistic scholarship to show that. Yet a growing concern among researchers working in this area is that this scholarship may not always reach the right audiences to have as much of a real-world impact as it could or should have.

But how do we make our research more accessible to those who are in a position to improve the design and implementation of law, procedure, and policy? For myself and collaborators like Dr Alexandra Grey, and members of our Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network, our recent efforts have been multi-pronged, involving everything from preparing individual submissions to relevant government inquiries and reviews, through publishing and guest editing in legal journals, to presenting at law conferences.

However, as pioneering law and language scholar Diana Eades recently observed, effecting change in this area is like water dropping on stone: it is a long-term process.

Therefore, it is just as important to reach future lawyers and law- and policy-makers. As a teacher based in a law faculty, 2020 created a unique opportunity for me to work on integrating linguistics research into my law teaching.

In this post, I report back on the way in which I integrated my research expertise – in linguistics and beyond – into my teaching. I first provide some background on the teaching context, and explain what I did to integrate linguistics (and other) scholarship into my teaching during the changes that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, I will share the feedback I received about the learning materials I developed and critically reflect on possible next steps.

Ethics Law and Justice in 2020

Since beginning as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2019, I’ve had the opportunity to teach in a core subject, Ethics Law and Justice (ELJ), which provides (usually) first-year law students with the opportunity to learn about lawyers’ professional practice rules, reflect on ethical legal practice, and on access to justice in legal settings. My Fellowship research project involves exploring the beliefs and practices of a particular group of practitioners – migration agents – and specifically how they and their clients navigate access to justice through their interactions. More broadly, my research is interested in linguistic diversity as a factor for access to justice. As a core subject, all law students must complete ELJ, creating an excellent opportunity for me to reach a large number of potential future legal practitioners at an early stage in their study.

In March 2020, in response to the global spread of Covid-19, UTS made the decision to shift classes online. For ELJ, we shifted to using Blackboard, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, with individual teachers being responsible for the particular timing, structure and medium for their individual seminar groups. A significant change was the way we divided up delivery of the subject content. Each teacher became responsible for preparing a pre-recorded lecture, in the form of an audio-narrated Powerpoint presentation, for one or two weeks of the semester’s material, that would be accessible for the whole ELJ cohort to watch, rather than each individual teacher preparing and presenting the entire semester’s content individually for their groups. The teachers could then focus more energy into designing and conducting the interactive learning components of their individual seminars, and students could watch lecture-type content before (or after!) their live seminar.

Integrating research into law teaching

For me, this meant that I had the opportunity to update the learning materials to reach the whole cohort of over 300 students. I was responsible for the part of the subject exploring social and cultural factors that can affect access to justice, with pre-existing material mentioning refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, Indigenous people, and disability. There was also a little content on language considerations, with some discussion questions about whether students had ever communicated using an interpreter before, and the Local Court Bench Book’s section on interpreters was included as a reading resource.

While still covering the same topics as usual, I redesigned the lecture content to integrate a range of new considerations and explanations, beyond what had been provided previously. These incorporated my and others’ scholarship from my various areas of research interest, including studies on asylum seekers and refugees, language and cultural concerns in legal settings. Some of this research I also added as additional readings, choosing blog posts rather than traditional research outputs to maximize accessibility and engagement for students. Similarly, I added a video resource (Aboriginal Interpreter Service), along with an explanation and instructions, to provide another engaging source that exemplified in practice some of the relevant linguistic and cultural concerns.

Where to next?

Autumn 2020 provided an opportunity for me to integrate my research experience and expertise into my teaching, and the feedback I received overall show promise. Personally, I believe that making these changes also motivated me as a teacher: not only could I share knowledge and do my best to present this in accessible ways for students, I was also able to demonstrate my passion and enthusiasm for these areas.

Most importantly, I was able to raise awareness about language and communication among the next generation of lawyers.

However, like some of my colleagues, I suspect that the remaining challenge is mainly one of delivery rather than content, especially in the context of remote learning. In future, the key way I’d like to refine my approach is to do more to integrate innovative learning technologies. While I am confident and passionate about the content, it is equally important to reflect carefully on how I share my knowledge, and ensure that it is accessible, relatable and engaging. In fact, when teaching topics that are all about optimal communication and equal participation, I’d go so far as to say that this is absolutely essential!

*** 

The Hani are one of the officially recognized ethnic minorities in China, and can also be found across the border in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. Like other ethnic minorities in China, Hani people need to become bilingual in Putonghua proficiency for educational and social mobility. At the same time, ethnic minority languages are increasingly valorized in tourism and for China’s soft power project in its borderlands. Even so, the linguistic and social experiences of China’s minority speakers remain poorly understood. How do their linguistic proficiencies and life trajectories intersect? What are the affordances and constraints of using the minority language, the national language Chinese, and the global language English? Here, we examine the experiences of three Chinese Hani women from three different generations to explore these questions.

Hani folksongs bring comfort to older generation facing poverty and hardship

Hani woman singing Haba while weaving

Haba is a Hani folksong genre that was included by UNESCO in the world intangible cultural heritage in 2013. Official reports describe Haba as a men’s tradition. It is commonly assumed that only Hani men may sing Haba and win the respect and reputation it brings. This is not entirely true, as our research has found. Hani women sing Haba, too, as a daily practice of self-comfort. However, they do so without an audience. This may be particularly true of poor older Hani women without formal education.

Let’s consider the example of the Haba singing of Fang (a pseudonym). Fang is the aunt of the second author, Yongzhen. Yongzhen often hears her aunt singing Haba in private spaces. Fang’s Haba singing is full of lament and sorrow featuring narratives of the hardships and misfortunes of her life.

Born in 1966, as the oldest daughter in her poverty-stricken family, Fang’s life has been overshadowed by the pressure to bear a son. As a child, she did not have a chance to receive any formal education and so she remains monolingual in Hani and illiterate. At the age of 16, she was forced to marry a man who she had never met and who lived in an even more remote village. Shortly after, she gave birth to her first daughter. Over the next 20 years, she bore 13 daughters before the desired son was born when she was 40 years old.

Today, that son is her only surviving child, and Fang suffers from poor physical and mental health. Singing Haba is a way for her to digest her bitterness, to reduce her sorrow, and to comfort herself, as in this song (our translation):

I married you because I used to think that you would treat me well and live with me.
Now you don’t care for me and don’t even bother to talk to me.
However, I have delivered these children for you in your home.
How come you don’t talk to me properly?
I plant the land on my own.
Our children are born, and the land is planted.
I gave birth to our children. I don’ t want to leave them or abandon them.
The land is planted. I don’t want to leave it.
You often beat me, hit me with your fists and kick me with your legs.
I don’t want to stay here any longer.
I don’t want to eat at all. Neither do I want to drink.
I can only worry, about these children, this land.
I choose to endure the sufferings and stay.
But still you don’t treat me well, don’t talk to me properly.
In this house, I want to cry every time I pick my bowl and take my chopsticks.
This is not my home, but the home of others, your home.
I eat two meals a day, yet my belly is still empty.
The water I drink is never gulped down.
The threshold of this house is like a python by the river, lying in my way.
I dare not take a step in.
I don’t want to stay any longer.
I don’t want to eat another meal here.
A day here feels as long as a life time.
But I don’t want to abandon these children here and leave them once and for all.
I have no idea why you don’t care for me.
I can’t make up my mind just to leave.
My desire to leave has led my feet two steps forward.
But I still can’t leave.
But then you don’t care for me at all.
My desire to leave has taken three steps away from this home.
But I still can’t leave.
The dog never changes its heart to stay and guard the home.
It is the same with me and my children.
The deer in the wild does not wish to stay, either.
Upon consideration, I also decide to hold back and stay.

Hani becomes glamorous

In contrast to Fang’s mournful Haba, which can only be found in personal and private spaces, Hani pop music has been promoted by government institutions to enhance local tourism. Hani pop music is bouncy, joyful, and optimistic, and the famous Hani singer Mixian (米线) is one of its most famous exponents.

Mixian was also born into a poor Hani farming family in 1983. Her educational opportunities were slightly better than those of Fang and she received a primary education but had to stop school because her parents need her help with farm work (China’s nine-year-compulsory education was not implemented nationwide until 2001).

Like Fang, Mixian’s life was also transformed at the age of 16. However, in her case, she did not have to leave her family for marriage but for work, when she moved to a tourist-centered city and became a waitress. Soon, she combined waitressing with singing for tourists. During one of her restaurant performances, Mixian was discovered by Beijing Dazang Record Company.

Since then, Mixian’s has become a national celebrity. She has released several popular albums, which brought her much profit and fame. One of her most popular songs is “My Hani (Honey) Baby”, which is performed in three languages and combines ethnic and global elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h8PXgZUdec

The song “My Hani Baby” distinguishes itself from other Chinese pop songs through the use of Hani language, English, and Putonghua, and the integration of ethnic and modern music styles. Although there are four singers who all identify themselves as ethnic minorities (Hani, Wa, Hui, and Yao), only Hani language appears in the text and is performed by Mixian. Mixian thus becomes a symbol of local ethnic identity while the three male singers perform the cool aspect of modernity by switching between English and Putonghua.

The theme of the song is one frequently found in pop music: romantic love. What is challenged is the traditional identity imposed upon Hani women who are not expected to marry for love, as exemplified in Fang’s story. The lyrics form a dialogue between Mixian and the three male singers, where the female character boldly expresses her romantic love, and the male character reciprocates.

Choosing the romantic theme and combining the ethnic language (Hani) with modern languages (English and Putonghua) have served to increase the popularity of this song. Whether it contributes to the emancipation of Hani women is another matter.

It is also worth noting that the commodification of the Hani language apparent in this successful pop song has not only helped Mixian establish her reputation but has also drawn public attention to the Hani language in China and beyond. One Chinese netizen liked “Hani Baby” so much that he started to learn the Hani language by searching for relevant materials and posting Hani scripts online. His posts in turn have become a learning resource for Hani people to acquire Hani literacy.

A new generation of educated multilingual Hani women

Yongzhen is both the second author and the third Hani woman we will now turn to. Born in 1999, receiving a 9-year-compulsory education was normal for Yongzhen, as it is for women of her generation from all over China. Her childhood was also shaped by rural poverty but in a way that is very different from previous generations. Like hundreds of millions of rural people from China’s underdeveloped western regions migrate, both her parents migrated to work in factories in Zhejiang and Guangdong.

Yongzhen introducing her bilingual translation project to university professors

As a result, Yongzhen became a left-behind child at an early age and was raised in a boarding school. Yongzhen distinguished herself by excelling in school and pursued her university dream. Her parents’ migration and labor experiences in developed cities were crucial in forming her ambition to pursue higher education and her parents have been unconditionally supportive of Yongzhen’s ambition.

Choosing English as her major was mainly driven by her parents’ aspiration to get a stable job working as an English teacher in the future. Now that she has been exposed to the Course of Language and Society with a particular focus on linguistic diversity, Yongzhen is motivated to become a new broker for Hani language and cultural heritage.

New Hani voices

When the Covid-19 pandemic was still prevalent last year, Yongzhen organized a team with three other ethnic minority female students to conduct a small project in their communities. They investigated how ethnic minority people in their hometowns might understand Putonghua-mediated public health information. Their findings are very similar to others conducted in minority-centered regions in China and featured in the Language on the Move Covid-19 archives.

Based on their research, Yongzhen and her teammates designed a bilingual app inspired by the national emergency language services. Their bilingual translation product has been recommended by the College of Foreign Languages at Yunnan University to participate in the national project targeting Chinese university students’ innovation and entrepreneurship.

Through the multilingual translation project, Yongzhen and her teammates developed their empathy towards their ethnic minority communities and learned of the importance of providing language service to linguistically diverse populations. Additionally, the have felt it their duty to become a voice for their peoples, especially ethnic minority women.

While writing up this study and having access to knowledge about linguistic diversity via Dr Li Jia’s course and the learning materials on Language on the Move, Yongzhen has come to understand how her aunt and other female Haba singers have been linguistically, economically, and culturally marginalized, and how the official and commercial discourses about the Hani people only reveal a partial truth while sometimes simultaneously erasing minority voices. As a multilingual and educated Hani woman, Yongzhen has developed a new faith devoting herself to the sociolinguistics of gendered trajectories of Chinese ethnic minority women for equal social participation.

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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 posts about the revalorization of Chinese dialects and the changing role of minority languages in Yunnan, this final post in the series focuses on the learning of foreign languages other than English in China.

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Yunnan as a link between China and Southeast Asia

Yunnan province in China’s southwest shares over 4,000 kilometers of borderline with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. Because of its geopolitical advantage and China’s regional expansion project, Yunnan is constructed as a window linking China to Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries (see detailed discussion of the linguistic consequences of the geopolitical position of Yunnan here and here). In the emerging discourse of China’s engagement with its neighbouring countries, Yunnan has seized the opportunity and actively developed its cooperation Southeast and South Asian countries on all levels.

In education, for instance, over 80% of international students in Yunnan are from Southeast Asia and South Asia.

The increasing number and scale of non-English foreign language programs is unprecedented and largely geopolitically motivated. Yunnan University, for instance, has established ten foreign language degree programs in languages of Southeast Asia and South Asia only within the past seven years. This bi-directional flow of international students learning Chinese and Chinese students learning Southeast Asian and South Asian languages constitutes a new approach in foreign language education in China, which is very different to the approach of metropolitan cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Learning Burmese as extension of family capital

The study by Yang Hongli (杨洪黎) has offered some interesting learning experiences of a Chinese female student majoring in Burmese. Being brought up in Yingjiang, a border town in Yunnan, this Chinese student was able to speak simple Burmese language for daily communication with her parents before entering university. Her Burmese proficiency is mainly associated with the fact that she has a Burmese mother and a Chinese father, and both of her parents have been involved in the jade trade and crossing the border for decades. While studying at university, this student reports that “缅语越学越有成就感，越学越有自信” (“the longer I study Burmese, the more I feel accomplished and the more I feel confident”). As one of the top students in her class, she is often set up as an example in pronunciation, oral communication, and academic achievement. Despite undertaking her Burmese studies in Yunnan, this student does not feel inferior to other Chinese peers from elite universities in Beijing and Shanghai because her university has a one-year-exchange program with Yangon University, the top university in Myanmar and her excellent oral performance in the national Burmese language competition also proves her competence over other Burmese majors in China.

Learning English as burden

Li Jia with Dai and Shan students in a Yunnan primary school

This student, however, feels quite stressed when asked about her English proficiency. In the interview she confessed that her English is poor because she has not passed CET-4 (College English Test Band-4). Without this certificate, she is afraid that her future job prospects might be affected. Similar to this Burmese learner’s story, a Thai major also reported her different language learning experiences in English and in Thai to Bai Qiongfang (白琼芳）.

This Thai learner used to study English in her first year, but due to her lack of interest and unsatisfactory performance in English, she decided to transfer to major in Thai. Another important reason to shift to study Thai is because of her ethnic identity as Dai. As a Dai speaker, she can understand 40% of Thai language because of the shared linguistic and cultural background.

Cross-border minorities learning Thai for additive identities

As China is increasingly promoting non-English foreign languages, Thai has become one of the most popular foreign languages in Yunnan and the spread of Thai social media also shapes Chinese young people’s desire to learn Thai. Due to the similarity between her mother tongue and Thai, this Thai learner has proved her competence in her class when she just started to learn Thai compared to other Chinese classmates who have to struggle from zero knowledge. It is interesting to note that her competence in Thai also shapes her curiosity and desire to maintain her ethnic identity. By working with her teacher on a project, she is running an official account on introducing the cultural practices of both Dai and Thai people. In fact, the increasing interest in speaking ethnic minority languages like Dai is not limited to grassroots efforts but also observed from top down approach in the shifting context of China’s geoeconomic and geopolitical conditions, as we shared in the previous post.

The studies mentioned above are mainly based on our students’ observations and lived experiences. An in-depth and longitudinal study is needed in future in order to understand how the shifting meanings of speaking “small languages” like Thai and Burmese might contribute to more equitable access to social resources. Whether the valorization of these foreign languages will fulfill the career aspirations of their speakers in education and at work also remains an open question.

While having abundant linguistic and cultural resources in Yunnan, we should not exaggerate the idea of multicultural prosperity. As we pointed out in the previous post, only a very small number of ethnic minority students can overcome the linguistic and social barriers to be accepted into university. English still constitutes a huge barrier for their access to equal education especially in remote and minority-centered regions of Yunnan. In order to fulfill minority people’s aspirations, a more diversified foreign language educational policy needs to be adopted. Rather than using English as the only foreign subject, Southeast Asian languages such as Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Laotian should be established to make use of the local linguistic resources and to empower young people’s upward mobility in the borderlands.

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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.

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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

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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.

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(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.

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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.