30+ Scholars
from
10 Countries
The 2019 The Language and Prejudice Conference brought educators and activists together to discuss how language prejudice shapes our interactions with others. Over the course of three days, Orebro University hosted three keynote speakers and nine parallel sessions. Our original goal was to find presenters who could talk about gender and ethnicity, but we ended up with much more: A diverse collection of thoughtful and critical topics that covered education, the workplace, media, legislation, and technology.
Our Keynote Speakers
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"Gender, Language and Prejudice"Jane Sunderland discussed how gendered language prejudice is so insidious that new outlets find it reasonable to write headlines like "Meghan Markle WEARS THE TROUSERS in relationship with Harry." Jane also asked us to be cognizant of semantic derogation. For example, there is a difference between master and mistress.
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Some of Our Presenters
Gaillynn Clements"Linguistic Discrimination on University Campuses"
Usha Nair"Language and Gender- Discourse Analysis of Women in Leadership Roles in India"
Mats Deutschmann & Anders Steinvall“Combatting Stereotyping by Evoking Stereotypes”
link to presentation: https://rise.articulate.com/share/7EnuzoJpQpao7GNkQi5IW0DRuKv4WtvP#/ |
Chun-Yi Peng"Mediatized Taiwan Mandarin - The role televised media in the formation of speaker stereotypes."
Mattias Ostling"A Cross cultural comparison of stereotypes surrounding conversational styles and gender."
Satish Patel"Digital manipulation, methodology, adaptation and dissemination."
link to presentation: http://appserver.humlab.umu.se/ftp/RAVE/Satish/Disseminating/#/ |
Gregor Kweik"National Minority Laws In Sweden and Why We Have Them"
Sujit Malick"Caste Contaminated Language – A Study of Select languages in India"
Laura Paterson"Who is prejudiced, who discriminates, and who are their targets?"- A corpus-based social actor analysis of prejudice and discrimination in the UK press.
Dozie Ugbaja"Accent Bias in International Higher Education"
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Panel Debate
"Models and categories will always be simplifications of real life - It is our job to point this out!" |
The Panel debate on Friday took place between Tamara Rakić, Jane Sunderland and Mats Landqvist, and was moderated by Mats Deutschmann. The first topic addressed concerns of how we as researchers can avoid falling into the trap of potentially strengthening and adding to stereotypic categorisation. Tamara pointed to the difficulty of taking all various aspects that constitute 'identity' into account in her quantitatively oriented research. As soon as you add one variable you increase the amount of data you need to collect by a factor of two, and eventually the task becomes impossible. If, for example, you even only want to investigate gender and ethnicity in combination, you can end up with hundreds of sub-groupings depending on how you define ethnicity and gender, and if you add aspects such as religion, education, social class etc. to this formula the task becomes overwhelming.
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"Representing 'real life' in a quantitative research design is simply not doable". |
"The behaviour of a few individuals in a category can easily skew the mean results for the group as a whole.""Our work is important and does contribute to change!" |
Then again, models are always simplifications, but they can still be very useful in exposing aspects of structural injustice. It is, however, extremely important for us as researchers to really bring home this point: models are not representations of real life. Jane Sunderland illustrated this clearly with references to her early research on how boys and girls were given/took 'floor space' in the classroom. Although, when looking at averages, it was clear that boys as a group occupied more floor space than girls, it was also evident that this 'mean figure' was largely a result of the behaviour of a few individuals. 'Boys occupying more floor space' thus actually meant "a few boys occupied disproportionate amount of floor space". Jane advocated care when representing such findings, and that we should avoid talking about 'differences' - 'differential tendencies' is a more accurate term.
Mats Landvist highlighted another aspect of 'categories' and identity in the current media landscape. Labels and categories are becoming increasingly important in identity politics. One such example are the numerous labels related to gender and sexual idenity categories that are emerging. Here initiatives often come from below (i.e. the groups themselves coin new category labels), and as a linguist, it is becoming challenging to keep up. On the hand, this is symptomatic of a movement that is challenging old binary models, and as such it must be seen as good thing.
In the final part of the debate the question of how we can bring about real change was discussed. While there was obviously no single answer to such a million dollar question, all agreed that research in our fields was important to provide objective fact-input to what is increasingly becoming a polarised debate based on unfounded 'opinions' in social media. Carla Johnsson from Stockholm University pointed to the fact that language research can have a real impact on dismantling language discrimination, in schools for example. With reference to the idea of 'translanguaging', Carla argued that this movement has radically changed language practice in some schools from monolingual practice, to models which allow for a more inclusive heterogenous view of languages. Jane Sunderland also referred to the idea of humour and resistance in this work - Let's all get our "Girly Swot" T-shirts for the next event! |
"Differential tendencies" is a better way to refer to findings that indicate differences between categories"Many new terms are emerging to describe various aspects of gender identity." |
Where do we go from here?
We are still in the process of constructing some form of open forum but are struggling to find the right tool. But if nothing unforeseen happens we should be announcing a new event in 2021 soon.
Also, don't forget the publication in Open Linguistics - Submissions Due: January 10 Feedback Response: Early March Revisions Due: Early May Papers must be submitted through the Editorial Manager portal here: https://www.editorialmanager.com/opli/default.aspx Specific requirements here: https://www.degruyter.com/view/supplement/s23009969_Instructions_for_Authors.pdf (note that we will fund open access fees for 10 articles in the volume). And in the future (but not for this publication!) also see Laura's journal Journal of language and Discrimination https://journals.equinoxpub.com/JLD/index |