The Learning & Organisational Development team would like to invite you to attend the next Aurora @Kent event supported by the University’s women’s network.

As part of our continued commitment to the Advance HE Aurora Programme, this event is open to all staff; professional services and academic – emphatically not women only. All are welcome!

The event will be on Wednesday 20 March, from 13.00 to 14.30, on our Canterbury Campus, Darwin Lecture Theatre 1.

In this session, Amalia Arvaniti, Professor of linguistics, from the University’s School of European Culture and Languages, department of English Language and Linguistics, will be delivering a talk on ‘Muted Groups and Implicit Bias’.

Professor Arvaniti’s research focuses on the study of speech; among other topics she studies speech variation related to social variables, including gender. For the last 15 years she has been teaching a module on language and gender that, while popular, sometimes receives negative reviews for being too feminist. Over the course of 15 years of teaching and updating this material she has noticed that sexism remains alive and well and especially hard to spot when expressed in subtle yet familiar ways. This prompted her to start a Facebook page as the bland feminist, a title inspired by a typo in a student evaluation, where when she has time she posts news items and commentary on sexism.

In the Aurora event, she will talk about the ways in which language can encode and reinforce sexist attitudes (whether overt or implicit) and how such usage can lead to silencing women and minorities. She has no panacea to offer but will discuss some strategies to counter these effects.

Booking is not required for this event.