*🎓 *We are happy to announce the next webinar in the CIRCE online
seminar series organized by the CIRCE <https://www.circe-project.eu/>
project in collaboration with DFCLAM University of Siena
<https://www.dfclam.unisi.it/en>, H2IOSC <https://www.h2iosc.cnr.it/>
project and CNR-ILC <https://www.ilc.cnr.it/en/>.
*Prof. Sender Dovchin*
/Curtin University, Australia/
*/Accentism as a Form of Linguistic Racism: Unpacking Power, Prejudice,
and Emotionality/*
đź“… *July 7, 2025*
🕓 *2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (CEST)*
*Venue*: Online
*Attendees*: Researchers, secondary school teachers, language instructors
*Summary: *Accentism is one of the key features of linguistic racism. It
is a form of linguistic discrimination against individuals not only
based on their accents but also on their race. Accentism functions as a
potent social marker that invokes judgements about a speaker’s race,
intelligence, credibility and belonging. Accentism should always be
understood at the intersectionality of racism because one’s accent is
never judged by separation from the language users’ race.
In this presentation, I examine multilayered consequences of accentism,
with the aim of advancing scholarly understanding of how accent-based
discrimination functions as a pervasive form of linguistic racism.
English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) people in Australia
frequently report being misunderstood due to their accents. These
experiences are not isolated or incidental – they are shaped by
entrenched powerful ideologies about the standardized and dominant
language system.
Prejudice caused by accentism against the racialized language users
could pose serious emotional harms, leading to linguistic inferiority
complexes such as social withdrawal, a sense of non-belonging, low
self-esteem, fear, and anxiety. The accumulation of these inferiority
complexes further instigates severe depressive symptoms of mental
health, such as suicidal ideations, eating disorders, substance abuse
and depression.
Accentism is a critical issue in social justice and calls for systemic
interventions to disrupt accent-based discrimination. I conclude this
presentation by discussing the pedagogical implications for language
educators. I emphasize the importance of taking an integrated approach
to address accentism and its emotional and psychological harms together
in order to transform language education.
*Bio: *Professor Sender Dovchin is currently a Senior Principal Research
Fellow at the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia. She is
also an Australian Research Council Fellow and a Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science Research Fellow. Previously, she worked at the
University of Aizu, Japan and National University of Mongolia. Professor
Dovchin was also an Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Review of Applied
Linguistics - national top journal. Professor Dovchin is a
world-leading applied linguist who has been twice recognised by The
Australian Research Magazine—in 2021 and 2024—as the top linguist in the
nation and among the top 250 researchers across all fields in Australia.
She is also ranked in the top 2% of the most cited scholars globally,
according to the Stanford University citation database. As a proud
Mongolian background woman, she actively incorporates Southern theories,
including Indigenous perspectives, into her work. She has led multiple
high-impact research projects, all focused on empowering children and
young people from Indigenous, refugee, and migrant backgrounds in
Australia and beyond. She has authored multiple research monographs and
edited volumes with prestigious international publishers such as
Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and among others. In
addition, she has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles—most
as sole or lead author—in top-tier Q1 journals, widely regarded as
benchmarks of scholarly excellence in the discipline.
Upcoming webinars:
- Eldin Milak (Monday, September 1, 2025)
- Christian Ilbury (Monday, September 22, 2025)
- Onur Ozkaynak (Monday, October 13, 2025)
The seminar is free of charge, but participants must register. To access
this and next events, you should create an account on theH2IOSC Training
Environment
<https://h2iosc-training-platform.ilc4clarin.ilc.cnr.it/registration>.
Once logged in with your credentials, choose the course “Language and
Accent Discrimination - Online Seminar Series” and activate it with the
code PbK837GtE. Make sure to have the Teams platform installed.
The registrations of the previous CIRCE Seminars are also available on
the H2IOSC Training Environment. For any inquiry, write to
contact(a)circe-project.eu.
Location: Cardiff, UK
Deadline for applications: 21st July
Start date: available immediately
End date: 30th April 2027
Keywords: LLMs, neuro-symbolic AI, graph neural networks
Details about the post
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cardiff University School of Computer Science & Informatics, to work on the EPSRC Open Fellowship project ReStoRe (Reasoning about Structured Story Representations), which is focused on story-level language understanding. The overall aim of this project is to develop methods for learning graph-structured representations of stories. For this post, the specific focus will be on developing LLM-based and neuro-symbolic reasoning strategies to fill the gap between what is explicitly stated in a story and what a human reader would infer by “reading between the lines”. More details about the post and instructions on how to apply are available at https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNS820/research-associate
SEMANTiCS 2025 EU
21st International Conference on Semantic Systems
Vienna, Austria
September 3 - 5, 2025
Follow us on *Twitter/X* <https://x.com/SemanticsConf>, *LinkedIn*
<https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7496190/?highlightedUpdateUrn=urn%3Ali%3Agr…>,
and *Bluesky*. <https://bsky.app/profile/semantics-conf.bsky.social>
Call for Posters & Demos
The Posters & Demos Track provides a platform for researchers to showcase
their latest findings, ongoing projects, and cutting-edge work in progress.
These include submissions on innovative applications, latest results,
unpublished ideas, prototypes of semantic technologies and their use in
various domains as well as applications, use cases, or pieces of code that
may attract developers and potential research or business partners. This
also concerns new datasets made publicly available.
The Posters & Demos Track offers an informal setting that promotes
engagement and dialogue between presenters and attendees. These discussions
can provide valuable feedback for presenters' future work while allowing
participants to gain insight into emerging research trends and network with
other researchers.
*Important dates:*
-
*Paper Submission Deadline: July 4, 2025*
-
*Notification of Acceptance: July 21, 2025 *
-
*Camera-Ready of Paper Deadline: July 28, 2025*
*All deadlines are set for 11:59 pm, Anywhere On Earth time (UTC-12)*
*Submission via Easychair on*
*https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semantics2025*
<https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semantics2025>.
Proceedings of SEMANTiCS 2025 EU will be made available open access by *
CEUR-WS.org*.
Topics of Interest We welcome contributions in the context of
semantic-based research and systems, which address – but are not limited to
– the topics of the Research Track
<https://2025-eu.semantics.cc/page/cfp_rev_rep>. Additionally, we encourage
submissions of visionary ideas, position statements, negative results, and
unconventional ideas. Demos should showcase innovative implementations and
technologies both, from academia and industry. We also very much encourage
submissions from industry, but they should be focused on presenting a novel
solution to a specific problem and not be in the nature of an advertisement
or commercial product description. Author Guidelines and Submission Poster
and demo submissions should consist of a paper that describes the work, its
contribution to the field or innovative aspects.
-
Poster and demo submissions are at most 5 pages long, including
references.
-
No double-blind submissions required.
-
Submissions must be either in PDF or HTML.
-
Submissions must be formatted in the style of CEUR-ART (
https://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html). An Overleaf page for LaTeX users
is available.
-
For demos, we ask authors to include links enabling the reviewers to
test the application or review the component. The absence of a pointer
affects the overall rating of the contribution.
-
Submissions must be original and must not have been submitted for
publication elsewhere.
-
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the
conference and present the paper.
Posters and Demos Track Chairs
Ivan Heibi
Diego Collarana
Kind Regards,
On behalf of the organising committee.
=========================
Dr. Kossi Amouzouvi
ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, TU Dresden
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