CIRCE Seminar | Dr. Christian Ilbury | Linguistic Discrimination in Higher Education: Unlearning Accentism: A student-staff collaborative approach to tackling accent bias
We are happy to announce the next webinar in the CIRCE online seminar series:
Dr. Christian Ilbury
Edinburgh University
Linguistic Discrimination in Higher Education: A student-staff collaborative approach to tackling accent bias
September 22, 2025
4:30 – 5:30 PM (CEST)
Summary: Socio- and applied linguists have long been committed to critically exploring the role of language and communication in systems of structural inequality and social (in)justice (see inter alia Labov, 1972; and more recently, Piller, 2016; Baugh, 2018 Badwan, 2021). However, most of this research has considered these issues as ‘real world’ problems, addressing linguistic inequality in contexts such as the courtroom (e.g., Piller, 2016), professional interviews (e.g., Levon et al., 2022), and the school classroom (e.g., Cushing, 2021). In this talk, I argue that these issues are closer to home: Universities and other institutions of Higher Education are complicit in the maintenance, circulation, and promotion of linguistic inequality. I contend that, as educators, we not only have a duty to resolve these issues in our own classrooms, but – as professional linguists – we have the tools, knowledge, and approaches to be able to address these issues across institutions.
To do this, I will first reflect on the situation at my home institution – the University of Edinburgh – a university that is often considered to be an ‘elite university’, before introducing the student-staff collaborative project I have been leading with the 93% Club (a society for state-school educated students) and the Scottish Social Mobility Society (a society that promotes social mobility by supporting and advocating for Scottish students). I will provide an overview of our activities to date which focus on three main activities: i) student campaigns that combine lived-experiences of these issues with sociolinguistic evidence, ii) two large-scale events that bring together academic researchers, students, non-academic stakeholders, and media to raise awareness of these issues, and iii) workshops that provide explicit training in identifying and tackling accent bias and linguistic discrimination in the classroom.
The goal of my talk is to, ultimately, demonstrate that a collaborative enterprise between sociolinguists and student societies committed to addressing structural and social inequality can be a transformational force in addressing linguistic discrimination in higher education. We suggest that this approach can and should be adopted by professional linguists elsewhere in an attempt to tackle linguistic discrimination and accent bias at other institutions.
Bio: Christian Ilbury is Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics and Director of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion for the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the Accent Bias in Britain project at Queen Mary University of London/the University of York. Since January 2022, he has been working on a student-staff collaborative project that developed training on accent bias and linguistic discrimination – making Edinburgh the first UK institution to introduce such training.
The seminar is free of charge, but participants must register. More information about how to access the seminars is available on the dedicated page.
