International Gender & Language Association Group Travel to New Zealand

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award will help support travel for US graduate students and young postdoctoral scholars to IGALA5, the fifth biennial conference of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), next summer at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. IGALA is an international interdisciplinary organization committed to the promotion and support of research on the interactions of language with both gender and sexuality. Presenters come from all over the world, and these meetings foster productive face-to-face conversations among people who might otherwise never even have had access to one another?s research and thinking. Looking at how gender and sexual identities connect to sociolinguistic identities has already pushed scholars to examine more closely how social practice - the kinds of things people do as they talk with one another - figures in people's development of linguistic styles, in their evaluations of how others talk, and in what they think about how talk should proceed. What is especially critical for continuing progress is sustained exchange between scholars from different countries, working with different languages and different social and cultural settings. Talk and talk about talk is always a central component of social life and social change, never the whole story but always very significant. Understanding issues of gender and language - and especially the extraordinary range of situations across different cultural, social, and historical settings - is important for working for more equitable gender arrangements and relations as well as for more general insight into how language works in social life.