Vijay A Ramjattan – författare

This volume explores and rearticulates the relationship between language and prejudice. Language plays an important role in the conceptualization, enactment, and defence of prejudice at both the individual and institutional level. Language (and language users) can also be the object of prejudice, and language itself can - with some conditions - be thought of as a solution to prejudice. The chapters in the volume examine how prejudice manifests itself, how it is perceived, and how it might be combatted. Parts I - III cover linguistic prejudices relating to gender and sexuality, ableism, and race and ethnicity, while Parts IV - VI explore social issues, politics and religion, and educational perspectives. The final part looks at projects and initiatives to tackle linguistic prejudice in a range of contexts. While recent work in the field has tended to inadvertently construct knowledge according to normative and Northern epistemologies, this volume features contributions that also provide an understanding of linguistic prejudice from Global South perspectives.

An in-depth exploration of how international teaching assistants (ITAs) make their accents workable to fulfill their duties as academic laborers. In this book, “workable” refers not only to manipulating an accent, but also to ensuring that an accent achieves certain objectives such as being perceived as an intelligible speaker, an expert educator, and an acceptable worker. Drawing on commentaries from ITAs working in Canadian universities, Vijay A. Ramjattan highlights how crafting a workable accent is not an apolitical endeavor, but rather a practice that works within and against the various communicative affordances of neoliberal academia. Just as it can involve fashioning one’s voice to satisfy oppressive communication norms, a workable accent can also contest these norms to varying degrees. Ramjattan ultimately demonstrates that (academic) institutions must do a better job at addressing how vocally marginalized workers are heard at work.