IGALA Elections OPEN (until Dec. 17) PLEASE VOTE SOON

Thu Nov 18 01:10:08 UTC 2010

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 is one candidate for Vice-President/President-Elect and two for Secretary. Please forward your completed ballot to Laurel Kamada at  laurelkamada at hotmail.comby December 18, 2010. Make sure you direct the ballot to Laurel rather than to the entire list. Please remember that you must be a paid-up member of IGALA by December 17 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.equinoxjournals.com/GL/about/subscriptions> Thanks, Laurel Kamada, IGALA Advisory CouncilAna Cristina Ostermann, IGALA President   (Descriptions of all candidates and job descriptions follow below.)  (1) Vice-President/President-Elect (Check if you would like to work for this candidate.) ______ Lia Litoselliti   (2) Secretary (select only ONE of the three candidates) ______ Allyson Jule ______ Michelle Lazar ______ Erez Levon    VICE-PRESIDENT / PRESIDENT-ELECT CANDIDATE Lia Litosseliti   I have been involved with IGALA since its inception and contributed to its activities (as a member of the Advisory Board, the journal editorial board, and at IGALA conferences). In a new role, I would like to continue to promote language and gender across specialisations or country boundaries, as well as within my own research priorities -- broadly: gender, discourse and research methodologies; feminist linguistics; and gender and language outside the global West. I would also aim to help increase the membership and visibility of IGALA outside the organisation and outside academia. My vision is of a diverse, cross-disciplinary and international IGALA -- an umbrella organisation that nurtures local and larger research networks, supports key activities (through the journal, conferences, and other media), and develops relations with other academic and political bodies.  I am a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at City University London, UK (with a PhD from Lancaster University), who has published widely in the past decade -- my authored books on Gender and Language and on Focus Groups being two prominent examples (see http://www.city.ac.uk/lcs/biographies/llitosseliti.html). I also hold team-leading/ senior management roles within my university, as subject leader, educational development associate, and most recently Programme Director for our undergraduate programme in language sciences. In representing IGALA, I will draw on a range of skills developed through academic scholarship and active participation in networks. Perhaps more importantly, I will bring a strong commitment to issues of diversity and equal opportunity and a genuine interest in dialogue.  SECRETARY CANDIDATES Allyson Jule   Allyson Jule, PhD (London: Roehampton), is a Canadian scholar now at Trinity Western University, BC, Canada, as Associate Professor of Education. She has been an active member of IGALA since 2002 and has attended and presented her work at many IGALA conferences. She has served on the IGALA Advisory Council since 2008. Her international connections with Canada and the UK as well as with Africa make her a valuable member of the IGALA community.   Her research interests include gendered use of linguistic space/silence in classrooms; gendered performances in the media, gender and religion (Christianity), and mother-in-law language.  Allyson Jule’s books include two monographs (Sh-shushing the Girls, 2003; The Beginners Guide to Language and Gender, 2008) and three edited collections (Gender and the Language of Religion, 2004; Being Feminist, Being Christian, 2006; and Language and Religious Identity: Women in Discourse, 2007). She has been widely published in journals such as Gender and Education and the Journal of Contemporary Religion. She also serves as the media reviews editor for Women & Language.    Michelle Lazar   Michelle Lazar (Ph.D from Lancaster University, UK) is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore.  In her research on gender, she brings to bear a critical perspective to the study of femininities and masculinities in discourse.  She is editor of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse and Communicating (Post)Feminisms in Discourse, and is currently completing a monograph on critical analyses of gender and feminisms in discourse.  She is founding editor of the Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse monograph series, and is on the editorial boards of seven international journals, including Discourse and Society, Visual Communication and Social Semiotics. She peer reviews articles for numerous other international journals including Gender and Language, Feminist Media Studies, Women’s Studies International Forum, and Women, Politics and Policy.  In terms of administrative experience, Michelle is Convenor of the Gender Studies programme at her university, Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies and Research in her Faculty, and is presently an IGALA Advisory Council member.  In her role in the IGALA Advisory Council, Michelle has been in charge of promoting the internationalisation of IGALA through the organisation of local gender and language events around the world.  As a native of Singapore, and a scholar from the global South, she lends another important perspective and voice to the Association, and is strongly committed to the internationalisation of IGALA.   Erez LevonI am Lecturer in Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London. In my work, I explore the diverse ways in which people come to understand and express complex social identities through language. The majority of my research has focused on the interconnections between gender and sexuality in different cultural and national contexts. In my recent book Language and the Politics of Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays in Israel, I bring both quantitative and qualitative methods together to help unpack the relationship between history, politics, sexuality and language in the Israeli context and to examine how these connections inform individual’s social behaviours. In prior research, I developed new experimental techniques for isolating and analyzing listeners perceptual judgments of gender- and sexuality-affiliated speech patterns. In both of these aspects of my work, I focus on trying to model individuals’ lived experiences of gender and sexuality as seen through the prism of micro-level variation in linguistic practice.I have been an active member of IGALA since its creation and am a regular attendee at IGALA conferences. I believe that the association has a vital role to play in bringing together language and gender scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and national backgrounds. As Secretary, I would work with the Executive Committee to develop effective communication strategies for the association (for both members and other partners). I would also be interested in exploring new avenues for cross-disciplinary cooperation at all levels of scholarship, and in devising new ways to  promote the association’s role as the leading scholarly repository of language and gender research. Finally, I am very meticulous and detail-oriented and so believe that I would do a good job in helping the administrative work of the association run as smoothly as possible.  
Job Descriptions

1. Vice-President (President-elect)

The Vice-President is responsible for

•   supporting the President as appropriate in all the above
•   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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