IGALA Ballot for VP & Sec

Fri Nov 7 15:33:51 UTC 2008

Dear IGALA members,

With election fever just dying down in the US, I would like to raise it again: 
It is time to elect the new Vice President/President-Elect and Secretary for IGALA, the International  Gender and Language Association. I am forwarding this ballot on behalf of the IGALA Secretary (who would usually run the elections), but Ana Cristina Ostermann has agreed to be a candidate for Vice President/President-Elect, so I will be taking the votes this year.

Please read this carefully (noting membership requirements), and respond with your vote (or queries) to ME, not to the GALA-l list or to Ana.

Thanks! 

Vicky 
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Victoria L. Bergvall
President, International Gender & Language Association (IGALA)
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Department of Humanities
Michigan Tech University 
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Dear IGALA members,

Below you will find the ballot for the election of the following positions on the IGALA Executive Committee: (1) Vice-President/ President-Elect and (2) Secretary. There are two candidates for Vice-President/President-Elect and two for Secretary.

Please forward your completed ballot to Victoria Bergvall at <vbergval at mtu.edu> by December 5, 2008. 
NOTE: Make sure you direct the ballot to VICKY rather than to me or the entire list. 

Please remember that you must be a paid-up member of IGALA by December 5 in order for your vote to count. (Note: Membership is extremely good value, especially because it includes a subscription to the Gender and Language Journal.) The form for joining IGALA/renewing membership is available at <http://www.equinoxpub.com/downloads/igalamember.pdf>. 

Thanks, 
Ana Cristina Ostermann, IGALA Secretary

(Descriptions of all candidates and job descriptions follow below.)

(1) Vice-President/President-Elect (select ONE of the two candidates)

______ Ana Cristina Ostermann

______ Ann Weatherall

(2) Secretary (select ONE of the two candidates)

______ Jocelyn Ahlers

______ Mary Talbot

VICE-PRESIDENT / PRESIDENT-ELECT CANDIDATES

Ana Cristina Ostermann
I am a Brazilian scholar who has enthusiastically served as the IGALA Secretary for the last two years, a position from which I gained large experience with the organization’s workings and political engagements. As the IGALA Vice President, I would like to work especially towards: 1) broadening the scope of the organization to geographical areas not yet fully reached and 2) bringing the numerous insights gained from the studies of gender and language to the awareness and benefit of the society at large. My scholarly work focuses on the interface of language, gender and sexuality and on the discursive basis of power relations. I am currently working with data on women’s public healthcare, guided by interactional and observational approaches (Conversation Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Ethnography). My past work and publications include investigations of discursive practices at an all-female police station and of a feminist crisis intervention center that deal with female victims of violence in Brazil, of transgenders, and critical discourse analysis of media aimed at young females. 

Ann Weatherall

I am an Advisory Council Member. I was on the IGALA5 organising committee. IGALA6 will be in Japan so it seems timely to have a President-Elect based in the Asia Pacific Region. I am a mid-career feminist academic who, if elected, will promote IGALA via my established relationships in a broad range of political and rofessional organisations. IGALA is a wonderful community and I would work to support that by encouraging active virtual communication. For those of you who don't know me, I am a Reader in Social Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. My research interests are conversation analysis (CA), discursive psychology and feminist psychology. My publications include five books and over 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. One of my first publications reported an experimental study of the semantic derogation of words for women (1993, JLSP) and a significant work is a solo-authored book (2002, Gender, language and discourse). I am currently exploring CA as a feminist language research tool and would like to use it address gender and language concerns.

SECRETARY CANDIDATES

Jocelyn Ahlers

I am an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Liberal Studies Department at California State University - San Marcos (USA). My research interests include the documentation and revitalization of Native California languages. This work has led to a consideration of the ways gendered identities play out in the context of language revitalization; I presented a paper on this topic at the recent IGALA meeting. I have also been an invited speaker at a symposium in Wales, where I discussed the role of gender in the development of a new Border Studies major. My organizational experience at my University includes leading roles in the development of a Linguistics program, a Border Studies program, and a proposed California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center. I also serve as the Program Director for Cognitive Science, and have been an active member of numerous committees, ranging from hiring and curriculum committees to Academic Senate. I look forward to the opportunity to bring my experience and interests to the position of secretary of IGALA.

Mary Talbot

I received my PhD from Lancaster, was previously a Reader in Language and Culture at Sunderland, and am currently based at Nottingham Trent University, UK. I was a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, China, in 2004. My books include Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction (2007), Language and Power in the Modern World (with Karen Atkinson and David Atkinson, 2003), All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth-Century Consumer Culture (with Maggie Andrews, 2000), Language and Gender (1998) and Fictions at Work (1995). I am currently working on a 2nd edition of Language and Gender. Some recent articles deal with sexism and masculinity in the tabloid press, the stereotype of woman-as-gossip in advertising and the popular media, and appropriations of feminism in a PR campaign for the National Rifle Association of America.

Job Descriptions

1. Vice-President (President-elect)

The Vice-President is responsible for

•   supporting the President as appropriate (see President’s duties at www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/organisations/igala/minutes/2007/Item2Jobdescriptions.doc)
•   assuming the duties of the President in the event the President cannot serve, and succeeding to the office of President at the expiration of the term as President-elect
•   monitoring the IGALA site, identifying new links, documents and information to be posted on it, and liaising with the Webweaver about this (together with the President and Secretary)
•   chairing the Nominations Committee for Advisory and Executive IGALA committee members
•   running the IGALA (Post)graduate Student Essay Competition (including chairing the committee, one member of whom will be the Graduate Student Representative)
-- The Vice-President is also strongly encouraged to attend the IGALA International conferences.

2. Secretary

The Secretary is responsible for

•   gathering agenda items for meetings
•   producing and distributing agendas
•   keeping Minutes of IGALA Executive and Open meetings
•   maintaining records of meetings and decisions
•   producing and distributing/posting Minutes of the meetings to the IGALA Membership
•   in conjunction with the Vice President/President-elect, organising elections and distributing/posting results to the IGALA membership
•   monitoring the IGALA site, identifying new links, documents and information to be posted on it, and liaising with the Webweaver about this (together with the President and President-elect)
-- The Secretary is also strongly encouraged to attend the IGALA International conferences.

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