2022
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December 2022: “What does English-language dominance mean for the field of international law and justice?”
This month’s Spotlight comes from Language, Culture and Justice Hub director Leigh Swigart. She brings us her reflections, along with those of other scholars, about the impacts of having a single language dominate a field that purports to both reflect and serve a global population characterized by enormous linguistic diversity. It cannot be denied that…
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November 2022: “Decolonizing Accent in English-Language Teaching”
This month’s Spotlight comes from Language, Culture and Hub member Mingyi Li. Mingyi is a Ph.D. student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. For her Master’s degree, she explored how Western influence has affected Chinese doctoral students’ understanding of the West before they came to Canada, as…
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October 2022: “The Global Coalition for Language Rights”
This month’s feature is contributed by the co-chairs of the Global Coalition for Language Rights, Lucio Bagnulo, Veronica Costea, and Gerald Roche. They introduce our readers to an exciting and much needed initiative. The early period of the covid pandemic was a strange time of simultaneous isolation and connectivity, as we all bunkered down at…
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September 2022: “Interpretation at the Asylum Office”
This month’s feature is contributed by LCJ Hub member Hillary Mellinger, an Assistant Professorof Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University. Hillary’s research focuses on language access within the U.S. immigration and criminal justice systems, the challenges that asylum applicants and attorneys encounter at the U.S. Asylum Office, and the criminalization of migration. Prior…
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July 2022: “Introducing the Macquarie Laws of War Corpus (MQLWC)”
This month’s feature is contributed by Annabelle Lukin (Macquarie University) and Rodrigo Araújo e Castro (Universidade Minas Gerais/Macquarie University). They introduce a newly available corpus, based on the key texts of international war law, now available to be searched using corpus linguistics techniques. This corpus enables critical law scholars and linguists to collaborate on studies of c.170 years of international…
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June 2022: “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Human Law – a new research field”
This month’s feature comes from Michael Bohlander, Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy at Durham Law School (UK). Prof. Bohlander previously served as an international judge at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh (2015-2019), which addressed crimes allegedly committed during the Khmer Rouge period, and is on the roster of…
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May 2022: “Linguistic Refoulement: Exploring the Intersection Between Language and Asylum”
This month’s feature is a blogpost about the work of Language, Culture and Justice Hub member Katie Becker, who volunteers with Respond Crisis Translation. Becker recently graduated with a Master of Arts in Global Security and Borders from Queen’s University Belfast. Her master’s dissertation, (In)credible Fear: Linguistic Refoulement and Indigenous-Language Speakers at the U.S.-Mexico Border, was inspired by her work…
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April 2022: “The Language(s) of Politics: Multilingual Policy-Making in the European Union”
This month’s feature is contributed by Nils Ringe (Brandeis class of 2001), Professor of Political Science and Director of the Jean Monnet EU Center of Excellence for Comparative Populism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He introduces his newly published book, The Language(s) of Politics: Multilingual Policy-Making in the European Union (University of Michigan Press 2022). The eBook version is available…
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March 2022: “Linguistic profiling: An under-recognized force in the justice system and beyond”
LCJ Hub member Shawna Shapiro, Associate Professor of writing and linguistics at Middlebury College in the US, calls our attention to an often unperceived influence on our interactions and understandings, including those in the legal field. Read more about Shawna’s work at her college webpage. One of the commonplaces in the legal profession and the criminal…
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February 2022: “Why is it important to define the concept of ‘plain writing’ in the legal field?”
LCJ Hub member Paulina Meza, Associate Professor and researcher at the Universidad de La Serena in Chile, contributes this month’s Spotlight on a critical issue around language and the law. Although the issue of plain language in the legal field has attracted great interest recently (Castellón, 2009; Songa, 2013; Carretero, 2015; Blank and Osofsky, 2017;…
