Baby's second conference - and now for something completely different

(I started writing this at the conference itself, then added to it on the coach ride home, before finishing it in dribs and drabs over the subsequent weeks. Basically, any 'I just did [x]' phrases are probably bogus.)

I've just got back from the 3rd i-Mean Language and Identity conference in Bristol (told you), and it's been quite the i-opener for me (don't worry, I hate myself for that pun just as much as you do). My first conference was for postgrads, so on a personal level this was a step up in the terrifying stakes, being my first 'grown-up' conference - the postgrads were so lovely, and these were Proper Academics that might rip me to shreds and tell me I suck! Throw in the fact that this was the first time I'd written a paper especially for the conference itself rather than presenting previously completed research, and it's unsurprising that I didn't sleep the night before.

Of course, I needn't have worried, because everybody has been wonderful, supportive and keen, even when I managed to talk about a graph that wasn't even on screen at the time. I'm beyond grateful (and still a little staggered) that people were happy to listen to me waffle for half an hour, and I'm even more grateful to Chris for agreeing to run the survey with me and present alongside me. It's been an awesome introduction to my eventual PhD work, and a great reminder that this is definitely what I want to be doing.

But beyond that, i-Mean has been a delight in an unexpected way. With the theme of 'identity' being such an abstract concept in the first place, it's unsurprising that the talks have been varied, but the sheer diversity of approaches, specialties and ideologies has been a particular delight. I saw several talks that were directly related to my sphere of research (Emma Moore, Julia Snell, Mercedes Durham, Fernanda McDougall, and Devyani Sharma to name just a few), but the majority of my time was spent meandering between talks which have no direct practical similarity to my stuff, but which captured my interest and curiosity.

I saw the very brave Nicola Puckey talk about metalcore fan identities and conflict in YouTube comments (particular props to her for voluntarily venturing into the cesspit of the Internet). Kay Richardson examined  Bigotgate and the political onstage/offstage persona; Yukiko Nishimura explained the employment of emoticons as a kind of 'virtual make-up' employed by Japanese bloggers to index a cutsey/kawaii identity; while Douglas Ponton talked on the distance-closeness aspect of the British Royal family in the media. All brilliant; all utterly unrelated to my field.

It's easy to get tunnel vision when you have a particular research interest, and of course having a dedicated focus is by no means a bad thing. But this weekend it's been lovely to dabble in wider areas of interest; to learn not to benefit my own work, but for the sake of learning.

I've also discovered failsafe areas of study where, even though I'm not working on the field myself, I'm especially keen to go along and soak up the research of the people who are. I suppose it's looking at my general interests through a linguistic lens (and in doing so, combining everything I love!). It seems to boil down to:

- Politics. There was a fantastic plenary by Ruth Wodak on the tightening grip that linguistic proficiency has on national identity, and how linguistic policing is more and more a part of citizenship issues, particularly in the UK. I think any investigation of language and politics just gives me more ammo to throw at people who say "it's only a word, stop getting so OTT about it" -- language IS politics, guys. I have a funny feeling my own PhD might get a bit ~social justice...and I'm quite looking forward to it.

- Feminism/gender issues. Well, naturally. i-Mean had a great wealth of language, gender and sexuality talks, and I wish I could have seen more.

- The Internet. Being On The Internet, watching talks about Internet linguistics is simultaneously fascinating ("ooh, I've seen people do that!"), embarrassing ("oh god, I do that!") and occasionally frustrating ("that's not what we do!"). If I hadn't fallen in love with variationist sociolinguistics, I think I'd definitely have gone into looking at language on the Internet. It's SO interesting. For now, I have to settle for blogging emotively on the subject.

- Sport. This is a surprising one, for me. I'm not hugely sporty, but I'm a keen spectator. I watch a lot of football in particular (owing to my dad's subtle indoctrination, of course - I still avoid red clothing unconsciously); despite the foulness that often surrounds it, the game and the culture fascinate me. I went to the National Football Museum in April, and it was so interesting to look at it all historically, and be able to appreciate the camaraderie and team spirit it fosters as well as analyse the abusive and sensationalist culture it perpetuates. There were a couple of sport and language talks at i-Mean, and they were incredibly interesting, too.

That last point brings me to the one thing that will most make me adore any talk anybody gives: enthusiasm. Kieran File from the University of Wellington gave a cracking talk about the linguistic makeup of post-match interviews, the performance of media identity by sportspeople, and how this differs between sports and cultures. It was my favourite talk of the conference. The linguistic content itself was stellar, but it was File's enthusiasm for sport, linguistics and the combination of the two that made me love it so much. He was so excited to have interviewed so many of his sporting heroes, and he'd taken something he loved and turned it into his bread and butter - that's basically the dream!

This is why I read people's dissertations, watch TED talks, and listen rapt when anybody starts talking about their work, no matter what it is. If someone is passionate about what they do, then it's a joy to listen to them talk about it. I refer to my favourite Road Dahl quote yet again:

“I began to realise how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.” -- RD, My Uncle Oswald

So, yeah. Thanks i-Mean 2013 - it was a blast!

Baby's First Conference

WELL. I thought post-dissertation life would mainly involve luxuriating in front of the TV watching endless repeats of Murder She Wrote, but it turns out to be even busier than before!

Alongside PhD applications, conference abstracts, and discussing potential teaching opportunities, I have started a new job; I'm now Project Officer for the Temporal Co-ordination in Communication project run jointly by York and Cambridge universities. My role sounds far more fancypants than it actually is, but basically I am working on gesture and rhythm in speech, and analysing audio and visual data in various ways to investigate how participants negotiate communication using both their voices and bodies. It's SUPER interesting, and I'm enjoying it immensely - I learn about eight thousand new things a day, and working on an actual linguistics research project is the most amazing opportunity.

Wednesday saw my lovely bestie Becky visit Grand Old York, and we had a fabulous time getting spontaneous piercings, exploring the city and the Minster and such (I love any opportunity to go Full Tourist; despite living here for a year, it never gets boring), and kicking through bright autumn leaves like the big kids we are. Subsequently joined by Ed, we all later prepared my house for a Hallowe'en party which went off wonderfully*, with costumes ranging from the typical (ghosts, skeletons, etc.) through a-typical (Caeser, Alice Cooper), to the quite magnificent (a zom-bee, from an apiologist friend). My offering was Daphne from Scooby Doo**:

Jinkies

Following a fantastic few days (and a discombobulating trip around Illuminating York, which you honestly couldn't have thought up unless you were in some kind of trippy fever dream), a different Becky and I headed off to Manchester for the New Researchers Forum in Linguistics, where we would both be presenting our MA research.

I've never been to a conference before, let alone presented at one, so the whole experience was terrifyingly exhilarating. I learnt a staggering amount (with several of the talks being directly relevant to my work, which was incredible), met some truly wonderful people I very much hope to see again, and according to Sam, did my first conference 'properly' i.e. went out to the pub the night before giving my presentation.

My talk had run long every single time I did it, but I think the nerves of the day brought out my usual, jabbery self and I garbled my way through it just on time without missing out too many important points. Questions were helpful and not too intimidating, and people were wonderfully lovely about the whole thing. I know I have a tendency to a) ramble and b) flail about, so it's good to know people got the jist despite my ridiculousness.

Giving it my best presentation face (photo by Becky).

I think the best bit about the weekend was just being able to casually chat about, amongst other things, linguistics and language with like-minded, lovely folk who are just as keen-beany as I am. Glorious. I can see why conferences are so addictive!

One final thing that came from the weekend was a sprawling Twitter-based game of #linguistmovies, which spread into #linguistsongs, and got so fun I decided to collect everything together here - a page which will no doubt be constantly extended, as we continue to furiously procrastinate from our real work by making terrible/excellent puns. Hell yeah, linguists.

*even with the presence of a Jimmy Savile costume, despite my assurance that I wouldn't let anybody in if they were dressed up like him. Not big or clever, guys.

**I'm more of a Velma myself, but my hair is the right colour for Daph.

#BOOM

I am very sorry in advance for the tone of this post, which will be quite shamelessly giddy and slightly bragging, but please do allow me this little immodesty.

MA Linguistics, with Distinction

WELL THAT'S A BIT EXCITING.

Having had a weekful of sleepless nights and anxiety attacks waiting for my results to come out*, we were finally told our dissertation results on Friday. I was shaking like a leaf logging into e:vision, and promptly burst into tears upon finding out I'd managed to get the Distinction I was so, so hoping for.

Basically my reaction. For reals.

My dissertation was a little bit of a risk; there was little background, and the phenomenon I was investigating was entirely unattested. And thank the sun, moon, stars and cosmos it all worked out. This is so far beyond anything I could have imagined that I still haven't quite been able to process it.

So, yeah, I'm basically over the moon! This year has been both the best and worst of my life in parts, and I'm just so happy to have something to show for it, something I'm immensely proud of. And, of course, I am incredibly grateful for everybody who helped me stay sane; friends, teachers, counsellors, and my amazing family.

And now comes the next step; PhD applications are in the offing, and I'm presenting my dissertation at the Manchester Salford New Researchers Forum in Linguistics in a couple of weeks, my first conference. Both terrifying prospects, but incredibly exciting, and I feel so lucky to be where I am right now.

Onwards!

*Remember Little Miss Academic Insecurity? Yeah, this time of year is where that kicks into overdrive and starts to affect me physically as well as mentally. Fun times!

Teacher appreciation LIFE

This post had been kicking around in my drafts for about a week, when yesterday I discovered that today is National Teacher Appreciation day. What serendipity! And so, here is a waffly blog post about teaching, and why teachers are tip-top humans.

'Those who can, do. Those who can't do, teach.' And those who trot out this old adage can get stuffed. Those who give enough of a shit that they devote their lives to enabling others to do, teach. Teachers are heroes, inspiration, the best of people. I know it's clichéd, and I'm sure repeated watchings of Mona Lisa Smile* have given me an even more romantic view of teaching, but I know without a shadow of a doubt that I wouldn't be where I am without the effort, support and general brilliance of several staggeringly excellent teachers. Yeah, I'm passionate about learning, and about linguistics specifically, but if through random happenstance I'd not progressed through my schooling having been taught by the people I was, I'm not entirely sure I would be this excited, this driven, this in love with studying.

**

At my high school, every single student between years seven and nine was terrified of Mr Taylor. He was a force of nature, and everyone knew not to cross him, lest face his wrath. And what a wrath it was - he could stand inches from your face and bellow at you, never faltering, almost sinister in his eloquence. Thankfully, this never happened to me, but I saw it many a time, and that was more than enough to stop me crossing him. Of course, it didn't help that Mr Taylor was also a PE teacher, and thus his yelling was also heard on freezing November afternoons as we did cross-country running (or as it was more commonly known, institutionalised torture). Basically, we were shit-scared of the man.

Then came GCSE English, and Mr Taylor was assigned our set. It was like knowing a different man. Mr Taylor smiled, laughed and joked his way through our lessons, vibrant and hilarious but still with an incomparable command of the class (probably from the residual fear that he'd explode - the man crafted his reputation well). He encouraged critical thought, pushed us to be better, but mainly let us feed off his enjoyment of the subject, of poetry and prose, of literary history.

I remember his teaching of Second World War literature in particular. I can recall his explaining the translation of "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"; needing us to understand the terrible irony of the 'glories of war' was incredibly important to him. And the pause, during Wilfred Owen's Disabled, after he read 'In the old times, before he threw away his knees' -- I've never quite been able to shake the power of that line, and I think the pain in his reading of it is the reason. He cared so much, about history and suffering and the importance of art and literature in allowing a generation who never had to live through it to understand, to appreciate what came before them, and how we're able to live so well now.

As is a pattern with all of these teachers, I was a bit of a pet to Mr Taylor. Not because I was particularly academically adept, but I spoke up in class, and went to him for extra help. He used his lunchbreak to gently dissect a piss-awful poem I wrote and help me to draft another (to this day, I remain a piss-awful poet, but he did help), and another to calm me when I freaked out about reading the bit in Great Expectations where Mrs Havisham catches fire and dies, and to read that section through with me, making sure I was okay after every few lines. We also bonded over being Manchester City fans, and thus started my long career of pretending to know more about football than I actually do. At one parents' evening, as my folks sat down at his desk, he said 'Hannah's doing fine - so, did you see the match last night?' and proceeded to talk to my dad about City for fifteen minutes.

When we left year 11, he wrote the whole class a poem (still pinned to my noticeboard), which contained a line for each of us. He also wrote individual poems for a few of us, and I can remember mine off-by-heart, even now.

Hannah Leach
A blue
Good for you
Stay true
To your calling

Hannah Leach
The beach
Lies across the water
Don't do what you think
Do what you ought to
And the sun lounger will be yours

I hope I never forget that.

We went back to see Mr Taylor a few times after leaving school, but haven't been in over a year now. I hope I get to see him again, but more than that, I hope he knows the lasting effect he had on our class. (I'm realising this is getting a bit Dead Poets Society all up in here. I promise none of these stories end with a classmate shooting themselves and a bunch of us standing on tables.)

To complete the picture, a school-aged Han (who apparently only had one photo-pose)

**

Then came college. In my second year, I studied English Language and Literature with the same teacher - Stewart McNicol. Here again was a a teacher who gave a shit, who was interested and interesting, and a little bit weird. He taught us about diphthongs by talking about hyaenas, schooled us in l337 speak, and littered child language acquisition lessons with anecdotes about teaching his infant son the word 'meteorologist' so he'd look super smart when anybody asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He just enjoyed it.

Stoo also invented McNicol's Gallery of Tedious Anthropomorphism, a new instalment of which greeted us nearly every lesson, and elicited a welcome chuckle.

One of the things I remember most clearly is, when talking about books written for children and their simplified syntax, I spontaneously quoted Black Books without thinking - 'look in the alligator's mouth: it's not there either!' Being met with stony, confused silence from my fellow classmates, Stoo finished the quote - 'we all drank lemonade, the end!' - simultaneously a) making me feel like less of a moron, and b) cementing himself as teacher-type extraordinaire.

Since leaving college, Stoo has been kind enough to help me complete my undergraduate dissertation, giving up his free time for naught more than a bag of Tangfastics. Actually, considering he follows me on Twitter, there's every chance he's reading this sycophantic waffle right now. If so, cheers, Stoo!

**

My lucky streak extended into University, where I was fortunate enough to be taught by some cracking linguists, many of whom had paved the field of linguistics in the first place. (I still get a frisson of excitement when I see a book and think 'the author of that book taught me!') Specifically, I was particularly felicitous to be taught extensively by Kevin Watson. While I loved English Language at A Level, it was my three years at Lancaster University that saw me actually fall head-over-heels in love with Linguistics, and Kevin had a LOT to do with that. Here again was a teacher who radiated enthusiasm for the subject, who took pride in the field, and who was sure of its importance and relevance.

Kevin also supervised me through my dissertation, and the man deserves a MEDAL for putting up with me. One time, having gotten nowhere with an assignment for a course he didn't even teach, he sat quietly by as I cried and waffled about the Turkish noun data in front of me that just didn't make any sense god dammit, and calmly told me that I just needed to read a bit further and think a bit harder, and - lo and behold! - having found the right book in the library, it all finally clicked. He made me feel like I could actually do something in this field, make an impact, and do it well.

Beyond that, he's just a damn good teacher. Eloquent without being confusing, clear without being patronising. And, sharing a common thread with the other brilliant teachers I've mentioned, he gave a shit. He cared.

And a uni-aged Han (no seriously, why do I only have one pose/expression when a camera is pointed at me?)

 **

There have been times where I've felt more of a nuisance than a pupil, and generally discouraged from doing anything innovative, challenging, or left-field. Instead, I've felt encouraged to sit back, take the easy option, to not really try. It happens, and while I don't blame certain teachers for occasionally being this way (teachers have bad moods too!), it can be disheartening.

I've been struggling, lately, feeling a little lost academically. And then last week, I had a brilliant meeting with an MA lecturer, who - yet again - seemed to give a shit, and who encouraged me not to abandon my ideas. Good teachers make me I feel like I can do stuff, and do it well. I now have to actually do the stuff, of course, but the encouragement I've received throughout my academic career has been absolutely invaluable.

Teachers are heroes, and a good teacher can make a cosmos of difference.

*I knowww, it's terrible, but it's so pretty! And their faces! And the clothes!

Little Miss Academic Insecurity

Today marked the ceremonial First Day I Have Cried Over An Assignment. I knew it was coming, as did everyone who knows me (and knows that crying is my unfortunate default reaction to any emotional stimuli: joy, fear, grief, excitement, awe, love - TEARS). Emotional breakdown over, I was yet again consumed with embarrassment at just how much of a ridiculous human I am. My academic insecurity bit is completely tired*, yet I can't seem to shake it. I find myself clinging to my transcripts until my knuckles go white because, when they're torn away from me, I literally am empty-handed.

It's always been the grades thing for me. I'm one of those 'Jack of all trades, master of none' types - though whether I'm even a 'Jack' of some trades is doubtful. I can doodle, but I'm no artist. I can hold a note, but I'm no singer. I can dance, but I was never the best at that. I don't speak another language, play an instrument, and - while I can string a sentence together - I'm no writer. But academia is my thing.

It by no means comes naturally; I have to work (and work, and work and work and work) to get decent grades, but the pay-off comes from the satisfaction of knowing that I did it - that someone else gave something I did the gold star of approval. Maybe that's a damning indictment of my terrible habit of getting validation from others rather than myself, but we'll leave that for the psychoanalysts (though they'd probably link it to the whole cliché of parental pressure and judgements, and they probably wouldn't be far off the money). But whatever it says about me, I'm not sure I'll ever really be able to shake that desperate need to get an A, lest my life and endeavours be rendered null and void.

I frustrate myself - I know how daft it is to have one's self-worth tied up in a bunch of essays, for crying out loud, and yet I panic and I worry and I work myself to sickness to make sure I do well. Academic insecurity is not the worst thing in the world to be ~afflicted with, and my tendency towards the hyperbolic probably makes my talking about it melodramatic and tiresome, but I honestly do worry what I would be without it. What am I, if not Hannah Who Is Good At Essays?

Oh self, you are a silly thing. The daftest thing of all is that this assessment isn't even graded. Yet, I know if I'm presented with a paper which contains a big red zero, I'll be crushed. I'm hoping that, as I have matured a little since undergrad, I'll now be able to actually listen when people say that, hey, making mistakes actually helps you to learn, and, hey, it's not the end of the entire universe if this essay isn't tip-top. And yet, when I think about not being able to pursue my academic dreams, I feel quite nauseous. I guess this isn't a thing that fixes itself overnight.

However, while I may find myself having fever dreams about a syntax tree reaching out from the paper and strangling me with its complementizer clause (get it? Clause/claws? Oh, I amuse myself), for tonight, I'm going to stop. I've had a delightful evening, and will now retire to look at the photographs of my new baby cousin (eee!), and celebrate the Doctor Who's 48th birthday with my favourite episodes. More tears may come tomorrow, but this is - at the very least - a start.

*If you get that reference, marry me.