36.2800, Books: Workable Accents: Ramjattan (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2800. Wed Sep 17 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2800, Books: Workable Accents: Ramjattan (2025)

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Date: 17-Sep-2025
From: Lucy Trotter [lucy.trotter at bloomsbury.com]
Subject: Workable Accents: Ramjattan (2025)


Title: Workable Accents
Subtitle: How International Teaching Assistants Vocally Fashion and
Contest Academic Labor
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
           http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Book URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/workable-accents-9781666958331/

Author(s): Vijay A. Ramjattan

Hardback, ISBN: 9781666958331, Price: £75.00

Abstract:

An in-depth exploration of how international teaching assistants
(ITAs) make their accents workable to fulfill their duties as academic
laborers.
In this book, “workable” refers not only to manipulating an accent,
but also to ensuring that an accent achieves certain objectives such
as being perceived as an intelligible speaker, an expert educator, and
an acceptable worker. Drawing on commentaries from ITAs working in
Canadian universities, Vijay A. Ramjattan highlights how crafting a
workable accent is not an apolitical endeavor, but rather a practice
that works within and against the various communicative affordances of
neoliberal academia. Just as it can involve fashioning one's voice to
satisfy oppressive communication norms, a workable accent can also
contest these norms to varying degrees. Ramjattan ultimately
demonstrates that (academic) institutions must do a better job at
addressing how vocally marginalized workers are heard at work.

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Applied Linguistics
                     General Linguistics
                     Sociolinguistics




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