RLM Slinn-Funabashi

The first highlight was having the opportunity to listen to the amazing Dr Ryuko Kubota’s talk “Justice-Affirming Language Teaching Through Praxis”.

I read many of Kubota’s papers during my Master’s studies so to hear her talk in person about her career, research on antiracism, intersectional (in)justice and decolonisation was inspiring.

She explained many of her projects and I’d like to share two of those here.

The first is her recent video series, World Englishes: Voices in Canada (2024) which challenges standard English ideology and native speakerism:
https://blogs.ubc.ca/worldenglishesincanada/

The second are two short videos for anti-racism which can be used in teaching “Your English is So Good”:
https://ctlt.ubc.ca/2024/04/25/edubytes-intersecting-biases-of-language-and-race/

The second highlight was learning about the field of ‘peace linguistics’ from Dr Andy Curtis, who analysed speeches of powerful politicians and has published ‘Bad Language: Decoding Donald Trump’. We analysed Trump’s speech ourselves in groups in the workshop and analysing how language can be used in conflict was compelling.

Dr Curtis mentioned that many in the field of applied linguistics are unaware of peace linguistics – as a recent graduate of the MA Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching programme at KCL I can confidently say that it was not brought up in any of our classes or by my classmates. So I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to attend this talk and open my mind to possible areas of study and research around conflict and peace with linguistics.

My final highlight was a clear view of Mt Fuji from the 10th floor observation deck: