Workable Accents

How International Teaching Assistants Vocally Fashion and Contest Academic Labor

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

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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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-09-18
Mått158 x 232 x 20 mm
Vikt840 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor184
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781666958331

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With this book, Ramjattan establishes himself as the leading thinker on accentism in educational linguistics and beyond. Not only does this book bring together utterly pressing matters of political economy, higher education, racialization, and labour consciousness, it provides strategies for casting off oppressive models around what makes a good teacher. By listening closely to teachers of various multilingual competencies, Ramjattan undoes allegedly common-sense notions around how and when accent is assessed and assessible, identifies precisely how it is used as supremacist wedge to keep people down and out of power, and discerns what schools and universities need to do to provide a truly just workplace for all. In a moment inclined toward cynical impulses and reactionary dread, this is instead a book driven by justice, commitment, attentiveness, respect for people, and clarity of educational purpose.