Congratulations, Winners of the 2024 Joshua A. Fishman Award!
This year, three early-career researchers have been selected for their outstanding dissertations addressing the sociology of language.
De Gruyter Mouton is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Joshua A. Fishman Award. The award, now in its third outing, recognizes outstanding dissertations that push intellectual boundaries and offer innovative, forward-looking perspectives in the sociology of language.
It was established in 2018 to honor Joshua A. Fishman’s intellectual contribution to research on the sociology of language, the field that he so prominently shaped for many decades. With this award, De Gruyter Mouton aims to ensure that his legacy continues to thrive among emerging scholars in the field.
The 2021 winners, Ben Ó Ceallaigh and Demet Arpacık, recently published their books in the series Contributions to the Sociology of Language, edited by .
This Year’s Winners
Many high-quality dissertations from early-career researchers across the globe were submitted for consideration in 2024. The selection committee, which consisted of an international panel of over 50 renowned scholars in the sociology of language, found the following three dissertations to be exceptional:
Joshua L. Martin, University of Florida, for his research on Automatic Speech Recognition Systems, Spoken Corpora, and African American Language: An Examination of Linguistic Bias and Morphosyntactic Features.
Martin’s dissertation looks at the bias found in Automatic Speech Recognition systems that convert speech to text, focusing on how these systems often fail to accurately understand African American Language. Errors like these could affect real people, especially in important areas like job interviews, legal cases, or even healthcare, where clear communication is critical. The study highlights the need for more inclusive technology that serves everyone equally.
Sharifa Khalid Muhanna Al Battashi, University College London, for her research on Translanguaging and Young Muslim Children’s Negotiations of Intersectional Muslim Identities in an English Reception Classroom: A Linguistic Ethnographic Study.
Al Battashi’s dissertation examines how young Muslim children use resources from multiple languages to navigate different ways of being a Muslim in an English Islamic primary school. In particular, it focuses on how children use multiple languages in creative ways to determine who gets to be the ‘good’ Muslim, which excludes others based on gender, race, age and language.
Sudha Athipet Vepa, University College London, for her research on Language, Education and the Empowerment of Women: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography.
Vepa’s dissertation critically examines how the English language is perceived as an essential resource in the education and empowerment of women in the so-called developing countries, zooming in on the trajectories of a group of factory workers turned students at a prestigious international university in Bangladesh.
Congratulations!
For more research on the sociology of language, make sure to check out the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, published by Mouton, and our book series Contributions to the Sociology of Language, edited by Ofelia García & Francis M. Hult.
In honour of Joshua A. Fishman (July 18, 1926 — March 01, 2015)
