BWLG and GALA

[Suzanne Wertheim]

Hello, everybody. Recently, Sara Trechter wrote this:

<snip> It  is unlikely that the Berkeley Women and Language Group will
>receive adequate  support next year to continue to do that conference on
>their own.  This  would therefore be a good time to offer support and
>learn from the Berkeley folks as we move toward our own conference and
>journal (?). In order to do  this, we would need to have at least part of
>our group's goals up and  running by early Autumn and infrastructure in
>place.

This is a good time for me to introduce myself and say a few things. My
name is Suzanne Wertheim, and I have been a co-organizer of the Berkeley
Women and Language Group for about three years (which is how some of you
know me). I've only been lurking so far due to various commitments, the
details of which I'll spare you.

Over the last year or so, it became clear to me, and some others, that
BWLG was no longer self-sustainable, that its mission and reach had
outgrown the resources (time and otherwise) of graduate students in the
Berkeley linguistics department. After talking to Mary Bucholtz and some
other GALA list organizers, I decided that the best course of action would
be to have BWLG merge with GALA. After a some e-mail discussion and a
vote, a consensus was reached that a merge with GALA should take place.
The first clear passing of the baton, as it were, will be a co-run
conference in Berkeley in the spring of 2000.

When past and present organizers discussed merging BWLG with GALA, what
came out as most important (in terms of a legacy, or continuing tradition)
were the following things:
1. a commitment to having new and cutting edge work presented at the
conference (although not necessarily in the journal)
2. graduate student involvement at high levels.

----

Now for my own personal two cents:

I would like to see a clear differentiation between the purpose and role
of the conference and the purpose and role of the journal.  It seems to me
that it's important to have "in-family" interactions, where people can
feel comfortable and experimental and maybe not terribly rigorous yet (I
have a serious beef with what I consider to be premature formalism). This
in-family place would be the conference.

I also think that the GALA  public face, as represented by the journal,
should be  extremely rigorous and considered, and subject to a review
board. This would, I think, help slow the stream of negative/disparaging
comments I hear so often, and would help to make the field of gender and
language study to seem truly "established," the establishment rather than
a rebellious splinter group.

I think that by having complete proceedings of conferences, this is
something that BWLG was not really able to do -- abstract review
committees felt compelled to consider each abstract for publication, and
not just conference presentation, and this probably limited the range of
presentations. Additionally, editors were unable to remove
methodologically questionable or unrigorous work from volumes, thus
lowering the overall quality of the presented public face.

That's all I have to say for now. I'd be really glad to hear people's
thoughts on the above statements and opinions. If you have questions or
opinions you don't want to post to the list, please feel free to contact
me personally at either wertheim at socrates.berkeley.edu or
bwlg at socrates.berkeley.edu.

Thanks, and looking forward to the discussion (and formation of GALA
itself!),
Suzanne

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Suzanne Wertheim
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Berkeley
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