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 po
Pride and Prejudice
It is an universally acknowledged truth that a researcher in possession of an approved PhD project must be in want of interesting data. It will not be new to any of you that in qualitative research interviews and focus groups, the role of the researcher/interviewer is not only tricky, but also, to some extent, compromised. The researcher elicits data, tries to enrich it in interaction, interprets it and discusses results. When I was collecting data for my PhD project about ge
I am a feminist, are you OK with it?
As a 20 year old male from the North West of Cumbria, labelling yourself as a ‘feminist’ can be seen as controversial. Well, I did just that. Not to say that I do actually see myself as a complete feminist, I would however say that I do agree with certain aspects of feminism. This didn’t stop me from publishing a Facebook status that read “I am a feminist”, in order to see what reactions I would get from people who saw my status. This was an idea sprung on me by my language a
Should we be studying ‘gender differences’? No – and yes
One of the hardest things about gender study still appears to be the need to challenge the ‘common sense’ view that it is all about differences between women and men, and for gender and language study that it’s all about differences in the way women and men talk. This is not only a popular, public view, but also one shared by undergraduate and new postgraduate students of the subject, and indeed, often, applied linguists not familiar with up-to-date thinking about gender. The
