This research collective is a fluid network of international academics from various disciplines, with different research foci, methodologies, and languages of interest -- presently, focusing on French and English.
Maria Candea
I'm a French sociolinguist and have been an associate professor at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University since 2001. I'm interested especially in social and political issues in French and Romanian pronunciation and speech perception. I explore a variety of areas, such as how people learn to adjust pronunciation patterns due to life long language socialization, how people deal with the awareness of prejudice linked to language ideologies about “standard” or “received” or “nice” pronunciation, and how sociolinguists can contribute to people's empowerment in struggles against discrimination. I'm involved in educative programs and am focused on a critical analysis of policies for equality and diversity in French high schools.
maria.candeaATsorbonne-nouvelle.fr
http://www.univ-paris3.fr/mme-candea-maria-29447.kjsp
James Sneed German
I am currently a professor of linguistics at Aix-Marseille Université, and my research interests fall into two broad categories. First, I am interested in how the melody and rhythm of speech are used to convey information about the conversation and the relationship between speakers. For example, how does the current sentence relate to what has already been said? What does the speaker think the listener already knows or doesn’t know? A second major interest concerns the role that social information plays in shaping how people use and understand the sounds of speech (including melody and rhythm) at an implicit, subconscious level. For example, can photos in the surroundings that have nothing to do with the speaker cause people to hear and interpret the same melody differently? To study these issues, I analyze the acoustic properties of recorded speech, and I test how listeners’ understanding of spoken sentences is affected by subtle differences in the social context. These two interests combine naturally in studies that involve speakers of different regional varieties of the same language (e.g., American English and Singapore English or Corsican French and “continental” French).
james.germanATlpl-aix.fr
Julie Abbou
My research is dedicated to discourse analysis in a social and political perspective: I look at how discourses carry stances, values and social categories, in the light of power relationships. Major themes of my research are therefore notions of (social and linguistic) categories, borders, margins and periphery. I am especially interested in the ideologies circulating about gender, which raise a lot of questions: What can we say and how can we speak about gender in different languages? What linguistic, discursive and semiotic devices do people use to position themselves regarding gender, in relations with their social categories but also their identity/ies and their individual agency? How do they/we use language to categorize or decategorize, and what do they/we say about that? And last but not least, how is it related to other social relationships such as class or race, and specific political agendas, such as anarchism, feminism but also nationalism or transhumanism?
julie.abbouATlpl-aix.fr
Aron Arnold
I am a sociocultural linguist and post-doctoral researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain. I obtained my PhD in phonetics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in 2015 and specialized in sociophonetics and gender & language studies. My work focuses on the way voice participates in the construction of gender identities and specifically in the way genderqueer and genderfluid speakers use their voices to construct non-binary identities. I am also interested in the way sexist, heterosexist and cissexist ideologies influence the construction of scientific knowledge, and how these ideologies can be deconstructed.
aron.arnoldATuclouvain.be
https://sites.google.com/site/aronarnold/Home
LeAnn Brown
My academic background is in theoretical linguistics and my most in-depth training is in sociolinguistics, specifically corpus development and experimental sociophonetic production and perception, as well as in psycholinguistic methodologies.
My research interests concern the roles of language in the creation and perception of social meaning, specifically the social constructs of gender, sexual orientation, race, age, regionality, and nationality. I'm also interested in cross-linguistic variation -- what kinds of social-indexations do second language learners acquire? An emerging area of interest is in discourse analysis and (meta)narrative analysis.
leann.brownATuniv-amu.fr
Oriana Reid-Collins
I have a background in interactional sociolinguistics, and I'm specifically interested in understanding how actors construct identities and shared understanding within an interaction. I've used interactional sociolinguistic frameworks and Conversation Analysis as ways to analyze interactions between academics and members of a minority language community to understand how these actors construct shared knowledge together.
oriana.collinsATuniv-amu.fr