ELECTIONS CLOSING

[Miriam Meyerhoff]

Dear Members,

Elections for the IGALA Executive and Advisory Committee close at the end of this
week: 28 May 2004.

Please try and find the time to vote if you have not done so already.

A summary of the positions and candidates immediately follows this short message.
You can use this as a ballot. Please write YES or NO after each person's name.
WRITE 'YES' IF YOU SUPPORT THAT PERSON'S CANDIDACY. WRITE 'NO' IF
YOU DO NOT SUPPORT THAT PERSON'S CANDIDACY. Statements from each
candidate follow the ballot/summary of candidates.

Return your vote to the Secretary (me) only. DO NOT 'REPLY' TO THE WHOLE LIST.
Many people's email replies to the whole list by defaut. You can avoid this by
pasting or typing my address <Miriam.Meyerhoff at ed.ac.uk> into the 'Recipient:' or
'To:' line.

Thanking you in advance for your participation.

Yours, Miriam Meyerhoff

*******
Summary of positions/candidates (please use this as a ballot)

Vice-President/President-elect (1 position)
Jane Sunderland

Secretary (1 position)
Susan Ehrlich

Advisory Committee (5 positions)
Rudolf Gaudio
Janet Holmes
Ken Nozaki Lacy
Claire Maree
Joan Pujolar
Jie Yang

********

STATEMENTS FROM THE CANDIDATES

Vice-President/President-elect (1 position)

Jane Sunderland
I have taught in the area of Gender and Language for many years. Currently, at
Lancaster University, UK, I teach ŒGender and Language‚ as an MA course and on
our Œthesis and coursework‚ doctoral programme. I also co-ordinate the University‚s
ŒGender and Language Research Group‚, and have done so for many years.
Further, I am a founder member of the new ŒLanguage and Gender‚ Special
Interest
Group (SIG) which will be an associate of the British Association of Applied
Linguistics (BAAL).

The majority of my publications are in the area of gender and language. While in the
past they have focussed on gender and (language) education, most recently they
have centred on discourse. In 2002 I co-edited (with Lia Litosseliti) Gender Identity
and Discourse Analysis (John Benjamins); most recently (2004) I have published
Gendered Discourses (Palgrave Macmillan), a single-authored research
monograph. I feel that I am very familiar with the gender and language field, and in
relation to this am currently working on Language and Gender: an Advanced
Resourcebook (Routledge), a Œreader‚ but with substantial amount of authorial
commentary before each extract and suggested activities after.

I attended IGALA1 (Stanford University, 2000) and was the main organiser for the
very successful IGALA2 (Lancaster, 2002). This means that I have a clear
understanding of what organising a large, international conference entails. I will be
attending and presenting at the forthcoming IGALA3.

I am particularly committed to fully Œinternationalising‚ IGALA, and would like
exploration of ways to achieve this to be one of the main features of my Vice
Presidency.


Secretary (1 position)

Susan Ehrlich
I am a professor at York University, Toronto, Canada cross-appointed to the
departments of Linguistics and Women's Studies.  I have also taught and worked
in the Netherlands, at the University of Amsterdam and the Netherlands Graduate
School in Linguistics.  My research over the last ten years has focussed on the
discourse of sexual assault trials, specifically, the way that sexist
ideologies circulate discursively in these contexts and constrain the kinds of
identities complainants are able to construct.  In more recent work, I am
documenting changes in the discursive frameworks structuring rape trials and
the kinds of subject positions that these new, feminist frameworks make
available to complainants.
I have considerable administrative experience at York University, including
chairing the newly-formed School of Women's Studies from 1997-1999.  I have
also chaired the Social and Political Concerns committee of the Linguistic
Society of America for the last two years, where we have dealt with a range of
issues including the discriminatory practices of scholarly organizations and
the politics of sign-language interpreting.  I believe that the
interdisciplinary and political nature of my research combined with my
institutional involvement in a range of social and political issues will allow
me to help IGALA develop links with feminist scholars outside of North America
and outside of the disciplines of linguistics and anthropology.


Advisory Committee (5 positions)

Rudolf Gaudio
Given my longstanding involvement in language, gender and sexuality research and
the diversity of my experiences as a teacher and scholar (described below), I see
myself as helping IGALA integrate scholars and scholarship of diverse ranks,
backgrounds and interests.  I would be especially interested in helping IGALA forge
links with scholars of gender and sexuality in anthropology, African and Islamic
studies who have an interest in language and discourse.
Language, gender and sexuality has been the primary focus of my research for well
over a decade, in both the US (gay & straight men's pitch properties) and Nigeria
(men who talk "like women" in Hausa).  Linguistic topics of my research include the
rhetorical and sociocultural pragmatics of morphosyntactic variation (agency,
deixis), verbal art (proverbs, Islamic oaths), codeswitching and borrowing (Hausa/
Arabic/English), language ideology, and intertextuality.  My interests in language,
gender and sexuality crosscut my other research interests in space/cultural
geography; religion (esp. Islam); media and performance; and political economy,
esp. race, nationalism & globalization.
I have experience teaching both undergraduates and graduates, on private and
public campuses, in research- and teaching-oriented institutions, in different parts of
the U.S. and in Nigeria.  Though I no longer have the opportunity to teach courses
on language and gender per se, I infuse an awareness of language, gender and
sexuality in virtually all my courses, including Urban Life in Africa; Theater and
Performance in Africa; and Global Media, Local Cultures.

Janet Holmes

Janet Holmes is Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, where
she teaches a variety of sociolinguistics courses, including a postgraduate paper
focussing on language and gender. She is Director of the Wellington Corpus of
Spoken New Zealand English and of the Language in the Workplace Project. She
was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1994.  She has
published on a wide range of topics including New Zealand English, language and
gender, sexist language, pragmatic particles, compliments and apologies, and most
recently on aspects of workplace discourse.   Her publications include a textbook, An
Introduction to Sociolinguistics, a book on language and gender, Women, Men and
Politeness, and an edited collection of papers Gendered Speech in Social Context.
Her most recent books are the Blackwell Handbook of Language and Gender, co-
edited with Miriam Meyerhoff,  and Power and Politeness in the Workplace co-
authored with Maria Stubbe.
I have many years of experience teaching language and gender courses and
supervising postgraduate students in research in this area.  I have also published
extensively in this area.  I would be happy to make this experience available to
IGALA in any way that might be useful.   It may also be useful to have someone on
the IGALA Advisory Committee who comes from outside Europe and the USA, as our
perspective is often a little different.


Ken Nozaki Lacy

Five reasons why I'd be worthwhile as a member of the Advisory Council.
* I'm still in graduate school.  That means a couple of things, of course.  The first is
that I'll have copious amounts of spare time to devote to IGALA.  The second is that
I'm too young and idealistic to believe there are limits to what I can accomplish, yet.
And third, in the grand scheme of things, this would rate rather highly as a priority for
me.  Consider.  No tenure reviews, no family pressures, no mortgages, no
mentorship duties.  Think back to your own halcyon days of ABD (All-But-
Dissertation).
* I'm a nice guy.  Granted, most of the folks in this sub-field are nice, so I'm not
particularly special in this regard.  On the other hand, people rather bizarrely persist
in thinking that I'm a nice guy despite the fact that I'm outspoken and opinionated.
Isn't this the sort of confluence of personality traits desirable in a council position?
* I'm not a n00b (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=n00b).  I've been
hanging around since IGALA1, and after being a lurker and then participant, I'm
intrigued by the opportunity to turn my puppy-dog enthusiasm into some direct,
tangible involvement in this organization.


Claire Maree

Claire Maree currently lectures in Japanese language studies, multiculturalism and
language education and gender studies at Tsuda College. She is coordinator of the
Multicultural/Multilingual Education Unit within the interdepartmental Multicultural
and International Cooperation Course at Tsuda.
Claire is dedicated to the study of language, gender and sexuality issues. She is
eager to work to spread the influence of this discipline in Japanese language and
education studies. Her passion for the area and bilingual English/Japanese skills
ensure that she will be able to assist in advising on both Japanese and gender
issues, and the broader area of language and sexuality. Claire looks forward to
having the opportunity to be more involved with IGALA.


Joan Pujolar

My initial research interests were centered on issues of language and identity in
plurilingual societies. I became interested in gender by doing ethnography, that is,
after realizing how important gender was to understand informal face-to-face
encounters, and also as a experience of subordination which had interesting
connections with that of cultural or linguistic minorities. In my research, I have sought
to build an integrative analysis of issues of identity in terms of class, ethnicity and
gender. I have studied the uses and social meanings of Catalan, Spanish and youth
slangs amongst young people in Barcelona and argued that these have strong
connections with particular strands of youth culture and gender identities that have a
class component (Pujolar 1997, 2001). Now I am doing ethnographic fieldwork in
courses of Catalan and Spanish for adult immigrants (mainly women) and analyzing
the interplay of ethnicity, gender and linguistic ideologies in these contexts. (Pujolar,
2003c).

(1997) „Masculinities in a multilingual setting‰. in Johnson, S and Meinhof, U
Language and Masculinity, chapter 5. London: Blackwell Publishers, 86-106. ISBN
0-631-19768-0.
(2001) Gender, heteroglossia and power. A sociolinguistic study of youth culture.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
(2003a) „La construcció del gènere en la interacció informal cara a cara: aspectes
teòrics i metodològics‰ in Estudios de Sociolingüística Vol. 4,1 (2003). SIN: 1576-
7418.
(2003b) „Els Œgamberrus‚ i la sociolingüística del gènere‰ in Fernández, Josep-
Anton
and Chavarria, Adrià Calçasses, gallines i maricons: Homes contra la masculinitat
hegemónica. Manresa: Angle Editorial. Pp. 92-107. ISBN 84-96103-21-8.
(2003c) „Teaching language skills to immigrants in a bilingual context: issues of
identity and power‰, paper at the 8th Pragmatics Conference of the International
Pragmatics Association. 14-18 July 2003,  Toronto, Canada.


Jie Yang

I'm a fourth year Ph. D student in the Department of Anthropology at the  University of
Toronto, Canada. My research focuses on language ideology, gender and political
economy. I did my fieldwork at a state-owned enterprise in Beijing  from June 2002
to July 2003, where I investigated the changing discourse and gender in the
restructuring of post-Mao China. I examine the gender effects of  China's
transformation from a centrally planned economy to a market economy by tracing the
discursive construction of modernity and gender since Mao's era.  Specifically, I
study three generation's women workers and their strategies to construct their
subjectivities as women and as workers through the everyday use of guanxi
practices (roughly "social connections"). In my research, I also  consider how the
Confucian traditions and state feminism as two conflicting forces are played out in
women's unemployment and re-employment in the transition to a market economy.
  I think I can bring to the conference committee current Chinese perspectives on
language and feminist studies.