The good people at UTFPR in Brazil invited me to give a presentation on linguistic discrimination as part of their conference X Semana de Letras. I was joined by Prof Dr Miriam Sester Retorta.
I’m very grateful to have been invited — despite not speaking Portuguese. It’s worth pointing out that English-speaking privilege opens a lot of doors. It’s unfair, so I address it, and I suggest some ways to mitigate that.
You can download the slides here (PDF). The graphics are clickable links to what I’m talking about in the presentation.
I got to be on a panel for linguistic communication! How did we decide to get into podcasting? How can you be more of a public linguist? And how do you make it pay?
It was great to hang out with these people:
Hedvig Skirgård, my co-host on Because Language
Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch of Lingthusiasm
Carrie Gillon and Megan Figueroa of the Vocal Fries
Daniel explains how, along with teachers Amy Ward Gordon and Kate Webster Blythe, designed and ran a high school linguistics program.
What were the challenges? How did the program change? Did OzCLO puzzles work for students? What advice do our teachers give to other non-linguists who would like to try this kind of thing?
Presented at the annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society at Macquarie University, Wednesday 19 December 2019.
Here’s my TEDx Perth talk on learning to love language even when it doesn’t do what you want. Many of us get grumpy about language, but ungrumping is easy, more fun, and can make the world a better place.
Thanks to TEDx Perth chair Rob Lines, my speech helper Karen Livey, and to all the wonderful listeners of Talk the Talkand the Speakeasy on ABC Radio.
I got the chance to participate in a thing with the LSA on 22 August 2019. Imagine this stellar cast of characters:
Anne Curzan (University of Michigan), Co-Host, That’s What They Say (Michigan Radio)
Michelle McSweeney, Host of Subtext
Geoff Nunberg (University of California, Berkeley), Commentator, Fresh Air (National Public Radio)
and the moderator:
John McWhorter (Columbia University), Chair, LSA Public Relations Committee; Presenter, Lexicon Valley
And then — what do you know — me. In my recording pantry.
So much great advice for aspiring media folks.
One question remains, though: how do we pay people to do the work of explaining language to the public? Did you notice the complete silence after that question dropped? I decided to let that question hang for a bit, because I wanted to see what the others would say. Alas, their answer was: get tenure, and then you can do what you want. That’s a good one — Australian universities don’t have tenure. But that’s been the traditional model. In other words, do it as a side gig. There’s no provision to make it your main gig, because that hasn’t been the way. But what if you want it to be your main gig? Why shouldn’t linguistics have a massive media production machine behind it, the way (say) Crooked Media has done for American politics? Arguably, having a machine like that would be great for linguistics. How does it get paid for?
We need to fix the way public linguistics gets paid for. Watch for a post about that soon. In the meantime, thanks to the LSA and to John and the panellists for a great session. I learned heaps. Hope you did too.
Language Across Time was a session for secondary students to learn about historical linguistics. Other organisers were Bethwyn Evans of ANU and Luisa Miceli of UWA. This session was part of the International Conference of Historical Linguistics, run by ANU and the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.
There’s also a page of resources, with videos and worksheets for students to follow along.
Here are the videos.
1: The Malagasy
2: Canoes
3: Numbers
If you prefer, you can watch and share the Facebook versions of these videos, which have subtitles.
30 July 2019 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off on Talk: Navigating Away from Truth Decay | Disrupted Festival 2019
I was very pleased to be able to moderate this session for the Disrupted Festival 2019 at the State Library of WA.
How do we overcome our intellectual silos? Or is this only a problem for the “other side”? What role can the traditional gatekeepers play — or are they already irrelevant? What’s the worst possible way to get news? All these vexed questions and more get an airing in this talk with Margaret Allen, Professor Nick Enfield, and Dr Julia Powles.