It is the middle of summer in the northern hemisphere, a time when many of us would normally pack our suitcases, travel the world, and present our research in a range of conference venues. Unfortunately, we have had to manage as a globally distributed community with events like the International Pragmatics Conference taking place online. And while not everyone is a fan of Zoom presentations, virtual lectures organised by Rutgers, Loughborough, York, and Mannheim are attracting hundreds of scholars from around the world – some getting up in the middle of the night! It seems that, if nothing else, Covid is bringing us together as a global community in new ways.
By Dr Marco Pino and Dr David Edmonds
Misgendering occurs when a person is addressed, referred to, or described with language that does not match their gender identity (Dolan et al., 2020). Misgendering affects transgender people (henceforth trans)—people whose gender is not the same as the sex that they were assigned at birth. Misgendering has repeatedly been cited as contributing to the social exclusion and oppression of trans people, and it can have negative impacts on their health (McLemore, 2015). Existing studies of the experiences and effects of misgendering have been based on survey or interview data. While the findings of such studies acknowledge that misgendering occurs in conversations (although not exclusively), to our knowledge, there is no research on how it actually unfolds in situ. Our project focuses on how misgendering happens and is addressed (or not) in social interaction.
By Agnes Löfgren, PhD candidate at Linköping University
The 17th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA 2021) took place online between 27 June – 2 july 2021. This is a report from the conference, from the perspective of a PhD candidate, with a focus on the general experience of the conference and some highlights of topics I found interesting. I’m Agnes Löfgren, a PhD candidate at Linköping University, Sweden, working with multimodal interaction analysis on depictions in opera rehearsals.
By Enhua Guo
Data sessions are an essential means of doing being a member of the CA community, and more importantly, a means to increase the validity and reliability of the research findings. In China, only a very small number of universities and research institutes conduct in-person CA data sessions on a regular basis, including Shanxi University, Ocean University of China, Shandong University, etc. Unfortunately, the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brought them all to an abrupt halt. However, the passion and need among Chinese CA scholars for data sessions persisted through Covid-19. It was this unstoppable academic zeal in the time of Covid that catalysed the birth of the CA webinar of Happy Data Session in China (HDS).