As we start the new academic year, this is the fifth in a series of
research news from your lecturers. If you’ve wondered what we get up to when
we’re not with you, this is it…
This past year has been an exciting one for me – it
was not only my first year working at Sussex, but my first year living
in the UK full stop! So I’ve been focusing on getting to know Brighton
as a place to live, Sussex as a place to work,
and the School of English as a place to call home. Between learning
how to navigate a new educational system, and teaching a wonderful bunch
of students, it hasn’t been a hugely research-intensive year for me. There have been a few highlights, though:
In October, a book that I co-edited with Miriam
Meyerhoff, Representing Trans: Linguistic, legal and everyday perspectives
was published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand. It’s an
edited
volume exploring representations of trans people and trans identities
from linguistic, legal, and community-driven perspectives. I’ve got two
chapters in it: one on the names and labels that trans people use to
self-identify, and another that I co-authored
with two community activists in Wellington, on barriers to equitable
healthcare faced by trans people.
Evan Hazenberg
This past year has been an exciting one for me – it
was not only my first year working at Sussex, but my first year living
in the UK full stop! So I’ve been focusing on getting to know Brighton
as a place to live, Sussex as a place to work,
and the School of English as a place to call home. Between learning
how to navigate a new educational system, and teaching a wonderful bunch
of students, it hasn’t been a hugely research-intensive year for me. There have been a few highlights, though:
In October, a book that I co-edited with Miriam
Meyerhoff, Representing Trans: Linguistic, legal and everyday perspectives
was published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand. It’s an
edited
volume exploring representations of trans people and trans identities
from linguistic, legal, and community-driven perspectives. I’ve got two
chapters in it: one on the names and labels that trans people use to
self-identify, and another that I co-authored
with two community activists in Wellington, on barriers to equitable
healthcare faced by trans people.
In March, I gave a paper at the Languages and Borders
conference at the University of Bristol, where I presented on a new
approach I’m developing to identify variables in linguistic systems that
carry socially-interpretable meaning (as opposed
to ones that are only reflecting structural changes). I started this
project as part of my PhD in New Zealand, where I looked at gendered
identity as a sort of ‘social borderland’ where some things people do
with language signal gender, but others don’t –
even when there’s a clear gendered pattern in who says what.
I’ve recently started a pilot project to test whether
this approach could work with other dimensions of social identity, by
looking at regional UK accents performed by actors. Which aspects of
their language do they have to modify to do an
‘authentic’ accent, and which can they get away with leaving
unchanged? In other words, which aspects are socially-interpretable as
regional dialects, and which go unnoticed? This question of what we pay
attention to in language – consciously or otherwise
– is central to a lot of what variationist sociolinguists do, and working on the methodologies and mechanics of answering it is one of my main research interests.
Finally, I’ve also been working on a chapter called
“Gender, Sexuality and the English Language” for the upcoming second
edition of Wiley’s Handbook of English Linguistics, which surveys some
of the foundational work on language and gender,
and takes a look at some of the more recent developments in the field.
Language and gender is one of my passions, and I hope to circle back to
working in this area again in the near future.
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