Dr. Vijay Ramjattan
Putting an Accent on the Academic Labour of International Teaching Assistants
In this talk based on my recently published book, Workable Accents, I detail how international teaching assistants (ITAs) conceptualize and perform vocal accents in relation to their academic labour in Canadian universities. The “foreign accents” of ITAs in English-medium higher education are often subject to a deficit narrative positing that they are sources of professional miscommunication. Consequently, ITAs may perceive their accents as objects to work upon in order to work toward positive evaluations of how they sound to various audiences. However, in conceptualizing their accents as workable, ITAs may have to vocally conform to and/or resist the academic status quo in particular manners. The talk explores these complexities by exploring how ITAs explain the sound of intelligibility and expertise, two major aspects of their academic labour. To conclude, I consider the implications of these findings in relation to ITA workplace language learning and academic worker rights.
About the speaker
Dr. Vijay Ramjattan
Vijay Ramjattan is a teaching-stream assistant professor in language and literacies education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. His teaching and research interests are generally based on the intersections of language, race, and work within the context of education.