This grant subsidizes international travel costs for approximately fifteen US scholars to attend the sixth biennial conference of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA6), September 2010 at the Tsuda College-Kodaira Campus, Tokyo, Japan. These NSF travel grants primarily target US graduate students of historically under-represented groups, but may also include other students, postdoctoral scholars, or untenured faculty. IGALA is the premier international forum for researchers who study gender and language; its goal is to internationalize the scope of language and gender research. This meeting, the first in Asia, addresses a concern that language and gender research draws its generalizations too heavily from white, middle-class American and western European linguistic and social interactions and assumptions. IGALA6 offers the setting of Japan with its particularly rich history of the formal study of "women's language." Highlighted areas include language and gender in the Asia-Pacific, negotiating multicultural/multilingual places/spaces, responding to change(s) in language education, and gender, language and international development.
NSF support enables the conference attendance of Americans, particularly from traditionally under-represented groups, who might not otherwise be able to participate. This brings diverse American experience and perspectives to the attention of the international community. It also enriches the outlook of American-based students and scholars who may have had little or no direct contact with language scholars and situations in other parts of the world, thus expanding their insight into the diversity of ways language connects with gender and sexual identity. Past conferences have drawn foremost scholars from around the world to share their data and theories on language's role in revealing and constructing human gendered/sexual identities, ideologies, and interactions across a wide range of cultural settings. Numerous publications from past conferences include widely cited articles in top refereed journals, edited collections, and proceedings volumes.
The goal of this $20,000 grant was to fund travel expenses of top US graduate student researchers working on the intersection of language and gender to attend the 6th International Gender and Language Association (IGALA6) at Tsuda College in Tokyo, Japan, September 18-20, 2010. Preference was given to qualified candidates who are members of underrepresented groups or who had never attended an IGALA meeting. Their attendance addressed a pair of concerns in the gender and language community: First, the field of language and gender has relied heavily on research done in western Europe/America (very often in white and upper-middle-class settings) to draw its generalizations. Desiring to broaden this scope, the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) quite explicitly locates its biennial conferences in diverse geographic locations to enable easier access to researchers from different areas of the globe. Hence, after conferences at Stanford University in 2000, Lancaster University in England in 2002, and Cornell University in 2004, the IGALA organizers moved to truly internationalize the scope of researchers and cultures represented: the 2006 conference was planned for Fez, Morocco (but was moved to Valencia, Spain after complications in the planning process). In 2008, the conference was in Wellington, New Zealand, and the 2010 site was Japan, a nation with a deep tradition of formal study of "women’s language" (though feminist researchers of the last four decades have challenged earlier assumptions of its distinction as a separate language, and pointed ideological assumptions and consequences of focusing on the differences versus similarities in gendered language styles). A second concern arises from this international scope: While this movement to different continents has succeeded in opening the conference to a more diverse set of data, attendees, and research subjects from nearby nations, a second concern is that it also moved the cost out of the range of the next generation of scholars, including many graduate students presently at US universities who are in training to be the leading scholars of the next generation. Thus, this NSF grant aimed to bring diverse younger US voices to the mix, to assist with the significant expense of international travel, and to encourage those who are members of, or who have undertaken studies of, under-represented groups in the US population. The eleven graduate students funded by this grant include African American scholars who presented research on the language patterns and educational experiences of users of the dialect known as Ebonics or African American English; these researchers, who often faced steep resistance in talking about their research in the US, were received with warm support and explicit advice on how to publish their findings and bring their insights from the conference back into their classrooms and future publications. Another grant recipient presented on her experience in researching blue-collar workers, and received the award for the IGALA top Graduate Student Paper Prize. Other grant awardees brought to the conference their ethnic experience or data drawn from their Native American, Bengali, Taiwanese, or Japanese cultural heritages. These eleven researchers also showcased their excellent preparation in US universities, contributing sophisticated analytical and theoretical insights to the conference exchanges. They joined 120 participants from 21 countries on six continents; research methodologies and areas represented included Asian literatures and languages, comparative literature, Conversation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Gender Studies, Language Education, Phonetics, Poetry, Queer Studies, Rhetoric, Second Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics, and Women’s Studies. There were 105 individual papers presented, 12 panels, and 4 workshops including a special workshop organized by graduate student (and NSF travel grant recipient) Jenny Davis (University of Colorado-Boulder) and Professor Sally McConnell-Ginet (Emerita, Cornell University), targeting graduate students, on "Shaping Your Research Persona," with extensive advice from several prominent international scholars on how to succeed in the field, e.g., regarding publication and research activity, mentoring, career planning. As these young researchers advance through their academic careers, they are already building on the research presented at the conference and the insights they gained from the workshop and their conversations with top researchers from around the world to produce new data, and more global, more broadly contextualized research and analysis that deepens our conceptions of what gender is and how it operates with language and culture to create our textured discursive styles. Challenging the simplistic notion that there are essentially two different speaking styles: male and female, given at birth, these researchers, instead, show that diverse cultural contexts and specific discourse settings within communities strongly influence stylistic choices that speakers draw upon as they construct their gendered personas. As these NSF grant recipients advance from these initial conference presentations to prepare conference proceedings, peer-reviewed journal publications, dissertations, and books, their work promises to illuminate the diverse settings that contribute to more complex understandings of gendered language.
