The Centre for Language and Social Justice Research is all about bringing academia to life. At York St. John, we believe in the power language holds in sparking transformation across local and international communities. This blog celebrates recent authorship, placing social inequality at the heart of scholarly interest.
Language-based research in the last couple of years (2022-2023), has fallen into an interesting array of subsections, from LGBTQ+ advocacy, Deaf cultural awareness, climate change and attitudes towards multilingualism with English as an Additional Language (EAL). These varying foci have arisen in post-pandemic research across the centre to investigate how injustices are linguistically performed. This blog hopes to detangle complexities and provide a platform for further reading intrigue.
LGBTQ+ Advocacy:
This year, Prof. Sauntson, director of the Centre for Language and Social Justice Research has published ‘reflexivity and the production of shared meanings in language and sexuality research’ (Sauntson, 2023). This chapter explores discursive construction in schools, of young people’s gender and sexuality identities. This empirical research outlines how positioning of both a researcher and participant as LGBT+, results in unique knowledge of how sexuality is played out through language within school environments. Acknowledgement of researcher reflexivity facilitates advantageous researcher-participant relationships on sensitive topics such as sexual orientation.
Sauntson’s myriad of research into diversity and fluidity in gender and sexuality expression in this discipline continues to bring to light the complexities of embedded heterosexism and heteronormativity. Non-conformity to these identity standards in school environments is a crucial research focus because injustices for the LGBTQ+ community prevail through socially contingent and binary notions of gender differences.
Further reading and references:
Sauntson, H. 2023. Reflexivity and the production of shared meanings in language and sexuality research. In S. Consoli and S. Ganassin (eds) Reflexivity in Applied Linguistics Research: Opportunities, Challenges and Suggestions. London: Routledge. 171-189.
Sauntson, H. 2023. Gender and sexuality. In L. Wei, Z. Hua and J. Simpson (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics. London: Routledge.
Deaf cultural awareness:
‘1001 small victories: Deaf academics and imposter syndrome’ outlines how a combination of audism, ableism, and negative attitudes towards signed languages make it challenging for deaf scholars to affirm their place amongst hearing dominant institutions. Eight scholars reflect upon their feelings of otherness, hostility, and non-belonging as they continue contributing to research and overcome exclusionary practices. Institutional barriers mean that deaf academics must fulfil their academic contracts whilst also juggling access-based responsibilities. This chapter discusses academic relationships with deafness, interpreter mediated language, with topics surrounding deaf gain and shared cultural values, placing imposter syndrome at the centre of deaf academic enquiry.
Further reading and references:
Chua, M., De Meulder, M., Geer, L., Henner, J., Hou, L., Kubus, O., O’Brien, D. and Robinson, O. 2022. 1001 small victories: Deaf academics and imposter syndrome. In M. Addison, M. Breeze and Y. Taylor (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education. London: Springer: 481-496.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86570-2_29
Climate Change:
Cunningham (2023) focused on a younger participant group, however this sample was university age students, whereas Sauntson’s work with the LGBTQ+ community, considered school age children. Cunningham’s (2023) paper discusses discourses about ecological justice and the need for an adapted higher education curriculum which would equip students with confidence and agency to tackle climate change issues. This spans beyond an individual standpoint, to an organisational and structural level. This paper signposts future research opportunities and how the actions of higher education practitioners can influence disillusionment and anxiety surrounding climate change concerns.
Furthermore, Cunningham, Foxcroft and Sauntson (2022) adopt a comparative and corpora approach, again exploring discourses but with an activist and politician dichotomy. Activist discourses centre upon the negativity of human impact, which is indistinguishable from being a marker of eco-linguistics and social justice. Contrastingly, politicians were found to centre around finance, industry, and economic priorities. Arguably, these semantic categories shift the activist perspective of responsibility to politician avoidance and resource focus.
Further reading and references:
Cunningham, C. Parks, J., Heinemeyer, C., Bailey, J. and Castaneda Martin, A.
- ‘Doing your little bit’ when ‘everything is just so big now’: Locating domains for developing agency amidst disagentic student discourses about our climate crisis. The SoJo Journal: Educational Foundations and Social Justice Education.
Cunningham, C., Foxcroft, C. and Sauntson, H. 2022. The divergent discourses of activists and politicians in the climate change debate: An ecolinguistic corpus analysis. Language and Ecology. https://www.ecoling.net/_files/ugd/ae088a_0c7b300e9f564506b50f2e2c6eb56bfa.pdf
Multilingualism/ English as Additional Language:
The Centre’s multilingual research has flourished in the last couple of years, take for example Cunningham and Little’s (2022) “Inert benevolence” towards languages beyond English in the discourses of English primary school teachers’, or Kim and Angouri’s (2022) ‘It’s hard for them to even understand what we are saying’ exploring linguistics in the multinational workplace. Kim and Angouri’s (2022) paper adopt an interactional sociolinguistics approach, to unpick the role that language ideologies play in organisational relationships for Korean multinational companies. Language is shown as key to challenging or perpetuating power asymmetries. Follow more up-to-date interesting research below:
Further reading and references:
Cunningham, C. and Little, S. 2022. ‘Inert benevolence’ towards languages beyond English in the discourses of English primary school teachers. Linguistics and Education.
Du, F., Jee, H., Tamariz, M., and Shillcock, R. 2022. Grapho-Syllabic Systematicity in Chinese: Chinese pictographs have a non-arbitrary relation with their pronunciations. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 44).
Hall, C. J., Gruber, A. and Qian, Y. 2022. Modelling plurilithic orientations to English with pre-service teachers: An exploratory international study. TESOL Quarterly. http://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3181.
Jee, H., Tamariz, M. and Shillcock, R. 2022. Systematicity in language and the fast and slow creation of writing systems: Understanding two types of non-arbitrary relations between orthographic characters and their canonical pronunciation. Cognition 226.
Kim, K. and Angouri, J. 2022. ‘It’s hard for them to even understand what we are saying’: Language and power in the multinational workplace. Critical Perspectives on the Management of Multilingualism in International Business, 19(1): 27-45. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-06-2020-0084
Kim, K. 2022. ‘We are in the hands of the head office’: Managing a multinational institution
in decision-making meeting talk. In Y. Porsché, R. Scholz, and J. N. Singh (eds) Institutionality: Studies of Discursive and Material (Re-)Ordering. London: Palgrave: 63-81.
Top 3 Book reads and reviews:
#1 Cunningham, C. and Hall, C. J. (eds) 2021. Vulnerabilities, Challenges and Risks in Applied Linguistics. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
‘This is an exciting volume of varied yet conceptually coherent chapters, challenging dominant paradigms in the field of applied linguistics. Established and emerging scholars are brought together, each with an authoritative voice and a committed activist stance. The collection broadens the scope of the field, encouraging it towards a thoughtful, critical, and socially relevant future.’
James Simpson, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Hong Kong
‘Risk, vulnerability and challenge are crucial concepts for a responsive and socially engaged discipline such as applied linguistics. This important volume explores the dynamics of risk in challenging contemporary times and the ways the vulnerability of being ‘at risk’ can be transformed into resistance and activism. Essential reading for researchers and practitioners engaged in applied linguistic research that aims to make a difference.’
Mike Baynham, University of Leeds, UK
#2 Kjaran, J. and Sauntson, H. (eds) 2019. Schools as Queer Transformative Spaces: Global Narratives on Sexualities and Genders. London: Routledge.
‘Expertly written and researched, this book is an invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers and students in the fields of education, sociology, gender studies and anyone with an interest in gender and sexuality studies.’
#3 Hall, C. J. and Wicaksono, R. (eds) 2020. Ontologies of English. Conceptualising the Language for Learning, Teaching, and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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(Last updated: 15th June 2023)