Universities in the UK are in the spotlight when they or their members are accused of racism. Drawing on broadcast talks, discursive-psychological investigations showed that news media sanction racism by challenging speakers whose expressions can be heard as racist and/or inviting victims of racism to share their experiences. This investigation turns to newspaper articles and explores how universities respond to and address accusations of racism.

News articles were found online, using the keywords ‘university’ and ‘racism’. Guided by discursive psychology, the analysis focused on the university’s response to the accusation, specifically how racism is (re)formulated and addressed.

After reporting the racist incident, a statement made by the university/its spokesperson is systematically quoted at the end of the news articles. These statements routinely begin with the formulation, ‘a spokesperson from University X said’, which institutionalises this response as well as the parties responsible for making and enacting the response. In these statements, it is recurrently observed that sympathy is displayed toward the parties affected and the extended communities, equality policy is cited, and the institution’s investigation is announced and portrayed as ongoing.

The findings show that racism reported is constructed, and treated, as an institutional problem. By making a statement, universities are constituted as responsible for addressing and sanctioning racism. Institutional racism is thus brought to life via news reporting. The study flags that whilst framing racism as an institutional problem grabs the news headline, it digresses the attention from the individuals and the day-to-day interactions.

Identity is developed and negotiated within the discursive space of communities. Recognition through representation in textbooks can be understood as a question of representational justice (Crenshaw, 1991; Fraser, 2005) – and thus has the potential to contribute to a just transformation, in particular in post-migrant societies (Foroutan, 2019). This approach does not simply concern visibility in textbooks, but focusses more comprehensively on the discursive quality of the representations.

In my analysis of textbooks for German as foreign/second language produced in Norway and Germany, I combine Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Canale, 2023; Weninger, 2021) with the coding procedures developed within Grounded Theory (Postholm, 2019). My research questions are: What representations of collective and individual identities are developed in the textbooks? What are the relations between them? And to what extent do the textbooks encourage pupils to question and modify these representations?

My work contributes to filling these research gaps (Zhang et al., 2024): I examine the different modalities of the textbooks in relation to each other, not only individually; particular attention is given to the use of stock photos (Jarząbek, 2018; Wolbergs, 2024) and the question to what extent these globally distributed photos are suitable to represent specific social realities. I follow an intersectional approach to identity, working with intersections of – among others – race, ethnicity, religion, social class and gender. And I explore the digital materiality (Weich, 2023) of the textbooks in order to ask to what extent they can contribute to the development of critical discourse competence.

This study seeks to assess the degree of heteronormativity found in contemporary English textbooks used in Norwegian schools. For this purpose, gender and sexuality are highlighted as dimensions of inclusion in foreign language education. A non-, under- or misrepresentation of marginalized or minoritized social groups is argued to form a representational linguistic barrier that puts successful language learning at risk. At the theoretical level, a queer approach is adopted that fosters a critical discussion of heteronormativity in educational practices. Against the backdrop of the Norwegian curriculum, a multimodal critical discourse analysis of books in the Norwegian textbook series Link (catering to years 1 to 7) is carried out, which foregrounds representational aspects that construct gender and sexuality in heteronormative ways. This is done to raise awareness among English teachers, and to give both teachers and textbook creators a chance to develop more inclusive learning materials.

Keywords: heteronormativity, gender, sexuality, inclusion, social representation, ELT, English textbooks, critical discourse analysis

The fact that German gay men nasalize (‘näseln’) can be described as a metapragmatic ste-reotype (cf., Agha 2007: 149, 202) and at the same time as a prominent aspect of socially enregistered “gay” voices in German (cf., Vorberger 2024).

In this talk, I examine this stereotype of “gay” nasalization and approach to shed light on it. For this purpose, I performed a discourse analysis of metapragmatic utterances about nasalization (cf., Agha 2007). The study draws from two sub-corpora compiled from existing German linguistic resources: Sub-corpus I (444 records, 1605-1927) and Sub-corpus II (3,266 records, 1949-2023). Through an inductive-deductive content analysis, I categorized the records to uncover the various associations tied to nasalization.

The findings reveal that nasalization is predominantly associated (1) with the characteristics of arrogance, distinguishedness and affectation, (2) with the languages/varieties of French and English (also Austrian and North German) as well as (3) the groups/types of nobility, clergy, teachers and gay men, which often occur in combination.

This analysis employs the concept of indirect indexicality to plausibilize how nasalization is associated with the widespread stereotype of an affected, flamboyant gay man. In addition, the data prove that this association represents a metapragmatic stereotype with discriminatory potential. Finally, I consider how such analyses of "metaphonetic" discourses can complement traditional phonetic studies.

Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vorberger, Lars. 2024. „Das klingt echt schwul“ – Eine soziophonetische Untersuchung zur stereotypen schwulen Aussprache im Deutschen. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 2024(80), 136–180.

This paper explores how Lubunca is used by members of Turkey's queer community to index and recontextualize queerness with broader cultural and political significance, grounding the analysis in the argument that language and gender's relation is continuously mediated and constituted through socially organized pragmatic meanings (Ochs, 1992). Originating as a cryptolect among imperial court entertainers in the late Ottoman Empire (Kontovas, 2012), Lubunca has since evolved into a complex linguistic phenomenon intertwined with the lives of the contemporary queer community in Turkey (Çakar, 2023). Drawing on data from Lubunca’s use in contemporary queer activism and general community interaction, the study employs a sociocultural linguistics framework to conduct multimodal discourse analyses of recorded interviews with Lubunca speakers and Lubunca-infused protest materials like banners and placards. The findings suggest Lubunca acts as a binding agent for the queer community by creating a shared sense of belonging and a unique queer ethos that is noticeably more politically robust than its counterparts elsewhere, like Swardspeak, IsiNgqumo, and Polari. Lubunca plays a key part in resisting heteronormativity and state-sanctioned erasures of queer ways of being and queer desires through its unique application in activism, which is empowered by code-mixing. By foregrounding how users invoke Lubunca in activist settings, the study highlights its capacity to recontextualize queerness as an agent of social change, thereby offering novel insights into our understanding of the reciprocal relationship between language, power, and identity in queer contexts.

References

Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp. 335–358). Cambridge University Press.

Çakar, B. A. (2023). Lubunca in social transition: A sociolinguistic analysis of the secret queer language [Master’s thesis, Vytautas Magnus University and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz]. VDU Cris. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12259/254142

Kontovas, N. (2012). Lubunca: The historical development of Istanbul’s queer slang and a social-functional approach to diachronic processes in language [Master’s thesis, Indiana University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1282642685

Does gender shape the way we interact, use language, and otherwise communicate? A large multidisciplinary body of research has addressed this question both quantitatively and qualitatively, along broadly essentialist or constructionist lines. Conversation analysts have addressed this domain with a different kind of question, focused on ‘how gender creeps into talk’ (Hopper & LeBaron, 1998) in systematic ways that are demonstrably consequential for an unfolding interaction and its outcome (e.g., Stokoe, 1998; 2010). In this paper, we contribute further to methodological questions about how to capture and analyse gender and interaction. As part of a multidisciplinary Centre for Early Mathematical Learning, we collected approximately 115 hours of video-recorded data in three pre-school settings in the UK as well as interviews with 27 early childhood teachers and practitioners. We analysed the video data with conversation analysis, building collections of all cases where gender ‘crept into’ the interaction and thematically coded the interview data for mentions of gender. Our analysis identified gaps between what practitioners say about gender (e.g., in accounts: “the boys are quite sort of typical boys, aren’t they?”) versus the actions and sequences through which gender is manifest (e.g., in assessment sequences: “yeah! perfect! good boy”). We discuss the implications of these gaps for research on gender and ways of knowing in the social sciences.

Hopper, R., & LeBaron, C. (1998). How gender creeps into talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(1), 59–74.
Stokoe, E. (1998). Talking about gender: The conversational construction of gender categories in academic discourse. Discourse & Society, 9(2), 217-240.
Stokoe, E. (2010). ‘I’m not gonna hit a lady’: Conversation analysis, membership categorization and men’s denials of violence towards women. Discourse & Society, 21(1), 59-82.