This award is to support graduate student travel to an interdisciplinary international conference on language and gender; it provides support for graduate student travel to the upcoming meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) in Gaborone, Botswana in June 2018. Participation in this conference will enable graduate students to present their original research, receive feedback on their work from senior scholars in their field, attend papers, panels and keynote lectures on a variety of topics by a diverse, international group of researchers, and build professional connections by networking with fellow researchers of gender, sexuality, and language, particularly those from southern Africa, where the conference will be held. The conference theme of Gender and Language in Multicultural Contexts, and given the conference location, we expect southern Africa to be especially well-represented in terms of paper topics and participants. The travel awards will be used to encourage the participation of US-based graduate students despite the high cost of travel to the conference site, and they will particularly aim to ensure the participation of scholars from underrepresented minority groups. As has been reported by recipients of previous funding, travel to international conferences would have been out of reach financially without support, and these opportunities enabled participants to initiate research collaborations, make contacts crucial to their successful completion of fieldwork, and disseminate their research in scholarly outlets.
IGALA is the world's largest and most prestigious conference on language and gender; attendees have come from North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand. The association's most recent meeting - IGALA 9 in 2016 in Hong Kong - attracted a total attendance of well over 200 people and featured more than 150 papers by 105 faculty and 85 students. At least fifteen of those students were from the US, thanks to funding support from NSF. The upcoming meeting has the potential to maintain that number of US-based graduate student researchers with support. IGALA conferences consistently draws the most prominent figures in the field in disciplines including linguistics, linguistic anthropology and social psychology, and the conference welcomes both established and up-and-coming scholars.
