The next presentation in the Activism in Progress series will be Wednesday 27 November at 2pm. Please find a registration link below and share it with anyone who may be interested. 

Please do continue to suggest names (including your own!) for next term's series. The work can be big or small. If you are suggesting a topic that relates to a marginalised group, please try to nominate someone from that group if possible. Nomination form here: https://forms.gle/qSisUyVGyBAkAUtb8

Topic: Activism In Progress: Christian Ilbury and Grace Mai Clark 

When: Nov 27, 2024 14:00 London 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwkdu-przosGd0hHoSzWWVtFy8vTq_WlSgd 

Socio- and applied linguists have long been committed to critically exploring the role of language and communication in systems of structural inequality and social (in)justice (see inter alia Labov, 1972; and more recently, Piller, 2016; Baugh, 2018 Badwan, 2021). However, most of this research has considered these issues as ‘real world’ problems, addressing linguistic inequality in contexts such as the courtroom (e.g., Piller, 2016), professional interviews (e.g., Levon et al., 2022), and the school classroom (e.g., Cushing, 2021). In this talk, I argue that these issues are closer to home: Universities and other institutions of Higher Education are complicit in the maintenance, circulation, and promotion of linguistic inequality. I contend that, as educators, we not only have a duty to resolve these issues in our own classrooms, but – as professional linguists – we have the tools, knowledge, and approaches to be able to address these issues across institutions.

To do this, I will first reflect on the situation at my home institution – the University of Edinburgh – a university that is often considered to be an ‘elite university’, before introducing the student-staff collaborative project I have been leading with the 93% Club (a society for state-school educated students). I will provide an overview of our activities to date which includes several successful campaigns which have made national headlines, a series of audio-visual essays that capture student experiences at the university, and a sell-out event on accent bias. I will then go onto introduce the staff training resources that we have co-developed and implemented across the university that offers professional training on recognising and addressing accent bias and linguistic discrimination in the university classroom.   

The goal of my talk is to, ultimately, demonstrate that a collaborative enterprise between sociolinguists and student societies committed to addressing structural and social inequality can be a transformational force in addressing linguistic discrimination in higher education. We suggest that this approach can and should be adopted by professional linguists elsewhere in an attempt to tackle linguistic discrimination and accent bias at other institutions.