Introduction to the Igala Blog
Hello everybody and welcome to the Igala blog!
I am Federica and I will be co-ordinating this blog together with other members of the IGALA advisory board.
If you do not know what to expect, let me give you some hints. This is an open space where students and scholars in language and gender as well as members of IGALA can share opinions, facts, and stories. We aim to discuss how everyday language affects our understandings, representations and constructions of gender. The posts may be related to relevant literature but they do not constitute full academic studies. The views are the authors’ own and they own the copyright of their posts.
We will publish the posts dividing them into issues, all related to a broad common theme. The one I am presenting today is our very first issue!
Issue 1 Researching language and gender: from stereotypes to scholarly investigation
Issue 1 features three posts:
Should we be studying ‘gender differences’? No – and yes by Dr Jane Sunderland (Honorary Reader at Lancaster University). While Jane needs no introduction having widely contributed to the field of language and gender, her post summarizes the challenges and the expectations that scholars face and have when approaching the topic.
I am a feminist, are you ok with it? by Reid Thompson, an undergraduate student at Edge Hill University. I am currently teaching seminars at Edge Hill and enjoying very much my time there discussing aspects of language and gender with some very lively students. In one of the sessions, I asked one of them if he wanted to post the sentence ‘I am a feminist’ on his Facebook. If you want to know what happened, you might want to read Reid’s post.
Pride and Prejudice by Roberta Iacovelli, a PhD student at City University London. Roberta tells us what it means to be an early researcher in language and gender as well as approaching gender from a personal point of view, evaluating how expectations and analysis of gendered practices, beliefs and attitudes might affect our scholarly experience and private life.
We look forward to hearing your comments. Please do keep in touch via this blog, the Facebook and the Twitter pages. It goes without saying that we aim to encourage debate, therefore offensive comments will be revomed.
We will come back soon with another issue. You can send your post for a future issue to federicaformato.ac@gmail.com. You can find the requirements (length of the post, language, deadlines) in a box at the top of the homepage of the blog.
If you intend to reference this blog, please follow the guidelines of your preferred style (e.g. APA, Chicago, Harvard). For APA: Author, A. (date). Title of document [Format description]. Retrieved from http://URL.
Have a fantastic read.
Federica (on the behalf of IGALA).
