Curated Theme: Making academic practices in linguistics more sustainable: reducing negative impact on the environment and society

not finished

Problem definition

What academic practices could/should have a reduction of impact?

sustainability of linguistics (academic practices, flying, topics chosen by linguists, collabs, etc) vs. linguistics of sustainability (the way we talk about sust topics). --> definition of sustling.

Impact

Do we want to reduce negative impacts, or to increase positive impacts?

Reduce negative impacts

• Working proposal on sustainable linguistics by Rodriguez Louro et al. (2019)
  • reduce flights (e.g. conferences)
  • develop remote participation in conferences and reduce other academic travel
  • encourage more sustainable ways of traveling and compensate the emission with carbon offset
  • reduce unnecessary merchandising
  • environmentally friendly catering
  • stop investing in fossil fuels and everything that is not sustainable
• use of open source programs
• disciplinarity (vs. inter- or multidisciplinarity. compartementalization of academia)

increase positive impacts

If we want to increase positive impacts, this can be done by including more diversity in the origin, medium and structure of the sources used in academic research. <HC: add a few terms and sources of IND-311, e.g. pluralism> frameworks, theories, interdisciplinarity, representativity, inclusivity of people and views, collaborative work. the solutions are not waiting on a university desk. acknowledge one's own background

Interdisciplinarity

• The positive impact of linguistic fieldwork can be increased by collaboration with the speaker community and their decisions about what shall be the results of of the work of a linguist in their community. For example, this can take the form of the creation of educational material in their language.

Representativity

• Other people outside of traditional "Western" linguistics have points of view and methods of research that are also valuable to the research of language - i.e. linguistics.
• e.g. considering nature and society as two different things (which the SDG do) is a eurocentric thought.
• increase representativity and inclusivity of perspectives > more internal "interdisciplinarity"
• in order to really understand language endangerment (as well as language in general), we need more views about it.
  • e.g. about division of nature/culture made in Western societies, which "does often not correspond to the way in which many Indigenous cultures view this relation, which affects their views on language" (lecture on ecolinguistics, week 3, slide 46)
  • e.g. TEK (traditional ecological knowledge) (see also slides Wk6_EcolingII)
• > Western bias

Other

• impact on prestige of minority languages and attitudes towards them

See also the Curated theme: Making academic practices in linguistics more sustainable: collaborating within and beyond disciplines

Four arguments for language maintenance

• social justice, political reasons to stop speaking a language.
• epistemic sustainability: "A dying language is a burning library of knowledge"
• indigenous wellbeing / wellbeing of minorities (not only language minorities but minorities in general)
  • spiritual, land-based, cultural identity, emotional health, physical health, educational, economic, restorative
• linguistic diversity

• what matters to people? what matters to linguists? is it possible to combine both? what are the interests of all parties?
• Who has expertise? on what? How can we combine the expertise of different people to have a positive impact together?

Impact on society

• fieldwork ethics
• find the relevance of linguistics through what it brings to people and society.

Impact on environment:

Infrastructure

• conferencing (carbon footprint of e.g. travel, merchandising, catering, as well as (financial) barriers for participation)
  • carbon-neutral travel and catering
  • remote accessibility
• publishing & data access
  • open access (HAL, Zenodo)
• tools: dependence on tools by capitalistic companies such as Microsoft, Google, Zoom, Twitter etc.
  • open source softwares
• others
  • The choice of research topics is relevant (also the points of view that we include in the research and publications)
  • funding
  • power & hierarchies
  • pressure to publish

Sustainable academia (quotes from Wk4 slide 27)

• Sustainable academic practices: Having a shared set of values around ‘how to do things’ that promote inclusivity, understanding and maximising long-term continuation without causing harm.
• Sustainable academic infrastructures: Having institutional and long-term support to maintain sustainable practices.

Possible pages and categories to link

specific SDG's