When CAS’s 18th Annual Robyn Rafferty Mathias Student Research Conference takes place on Saturday, March 29, in the Katzen Arts Center, for the first time it will be under one roof. In previous years, students presented their papers and posters in the Battelle-Tompkins Atrium, while performances were held across the quad in the Kay Spiritual Life Center.
“By putting the conference in Katzen, we not only get a beautiful space, but we bring all three elements of the conference together,” says Michael Manson, conference coordinator and academic affairs administrator for CAS. “Hopefully, students who have been seeing the performances will also get to see the papers and posters, and the students who have been seeing the papers and posters will also get to see the performances.”
Having all three types of student work in one building also reflects the conference’s interdisciplinary spirit. “Students tend to think of themselves in relation to their disciplines,” Manson says. “We try to create interdisciplinary moments. For example, if we notice that a handful of papers from different disciplines are about a common topic, then we’ll put them on the same panel to open discussion about what each discipline reveals about the topic.”
This year’s conference will also introduce new categories for judging student research. “Several of last year’s judges said they found themselves having to judge apples against oranges,” says Manson. As a result, several categories have been broken down into subcategories. For example, where there was once one award for social science research, there are now two: one for qualitative research, another for quantitative work. Now, he says, “all the apples are being judged against other apples and the oranges against other oranges.”
The conference showcases both undergraduate and graduate work in disciplines across the College of Arts and Sciences, with cash prizes awarded to one freshman or sophomore, one junior or senior, and one graduate student in each of 10 categories. The deadline to submit proposals is Friday, February 22.
Art: Harjant Gill
When anthropology professor William Leap founded the annual Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference in 1993, the goal was pure and simple: to provide a safe place for scholars to talk about the language of lesbian and gay experience without fear of retaliation. “In the late ’80s and early ’90s, people became interested in how lesbians and gays used language,” he says. “The problem was that not a lot of nonstereotypical work was being done on it, and professional meetings did little to support the discussion of these topics.”
When the 15th annual conference convenes February 15–17, the discussions will be very different from those that took place more than a decade ago. In the early ’90s, popular belief held that language shaped gay and lesbian identity. Scholars moved away from the language-as-identity argument, however. Today, scholarship supports the idea that people deliberately use language to lay claim to sexual and gendered identities—a belief affirmed by the conference.
The idea that people use gendered language as a matter of choice has clear real-world implications: Isolating linguistic patterns that elicit homophobic
reactions—and teaching vulnerable gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals what these triggers are—can help them to better protect themselves. Leap explains, “It gives the individuals control over difficult public situations.” This year’s conference will include more than 100 scholars from around the world. This international presence, says Leap, is essential to illuminating the ways that gay languages around the world influence each other.
The conference also covers more ground these days. “The number of papers has increased and the topics have broadened considerably,” says Leap. “They no longer focus solely on lesbian and gay language issues. We have bisexual and transgendered talks and all kinds of research on queer language.”
Discussion about the forms of language has also evolved over time. In the early years, most presenters focused on spoken and written language; today, papers explore the role of gay language in film, art, performance art, and theatre. This open, evolving discourse tends to attract younger scholars. “This is a site,” says Leap, “where they can play around with ideas.”
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