FEATURE THE WRITE STUFF
took place at the Royal Society in London. Students Wilhelmiina Toivo, from the University of Glasgow and Lauren White, from the University of Sheffield were crowned joint winners, each receiving a £1,000 prize. The two runners-up, Max Gallien, London School of Economics and Elo Luik, University of Oxford, were awarded £500. The competition, which is now in its second
year, celebrates and fosters the writing skills of the next generation of social scientists. This year students were asked to write 800 words about why their research matters, and how it helps us make sense of and understand the society in which we live. There were nearly 300 entries demonstrating the breadth and depth of social science research taking place across the UK. Topics ranged from Big Data, to climate change, class, immigration, dementia, the economy and education. Entrants were encouraged to temporarily
take off their academic hat, and write in a style different to what they might be used to, using their imagination to think of new ways to capture the interest of the public.
Entries were judged by a panel of science communication experts. They included Martin Rosenbaum, member of the ESRC Council and an executive producer in the BBC Political
The write stuff I
N MARCH, THE ESRC, in partnership with SAGE Publishing, announced the winners of its 2016/17 writing competition ‘Making Sense of Society’ at an awards ceremony that
Students demonstrate the impact of the social sciences through the second ESRC writing competition – Making Sense of Society – in partnership with SAGE Publishing
Programmes department; Martin Ince, President of the Association of British Science Writers; Miranda Nunhofer, Executive Director at SAGE Publishing; and Tash Reith-Banks, Production Editor for the Guardian’s Science desk. Here we take a look at the two winning entries.
Once more, with feeling: life as bilingual: Wilhelmiina Toivo, University of Glasgow
My dad had a rather liberal philosophy of bringing up children, but he would always tell us off for swearing. As a result, I grew up feeling very uncomfortable using swearwords. Or, at least, so I thought – when I first moved to Scotland, I noticed that it was actually very easy to swear in English. Interestingly enough, I also found it easy to talk to my flatmates about topics that felt too intimate to discuss in my native tongue. In a flat of seven girls from all over Europe, we discussed the full magnitude of emotions and topics; the fears of living abroad, falling in and out of love, death, sex – everything. Swearing and talking about these emotions was not easy just because of the inherent rowdiness of the student community, or because we felt liberated being away from home for the first time. The effect I was observing is something that goes deeper and touches a huge number of people who live in multilingual settings. Many bilinguals report ‘feeling less’ in their second language; it does not bear the same emotional weight as your native language. Feeling less emotionally connected to your second language might make it easier to use highly emotional vocabulary, which is precisely what I was experiencing with my ease of swearing and talking about sensitive topics in English. The scientific term for this is ‘reduced emotional resonance of language’. It is a fairly well-established phenomenon, but many specific questions still remain unanswered. For example, what exactly makes one’s second language less emotional? How does this affect different immigrant communities? My research project aims to address these questions by looking into the reasons and implications of reduced emotional resonance in bilinguals’ second language. It is still unclear what exactly shapes emotional resonance of a language and in what way – results thus far have been inconclusive. In the first part of my project we are exploring which factors in a person’s language background contribute to reduced
26 SOCIETY NOW SUMMER 2017
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32
