About PLEJ

The purpose of Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ) is to place socio-cultural linguistic research front and centre among the interdisciplinary areas of enquiry with social impact at SSEES, UCL, and beyond. Its focus is to conduct and encourage interdisciplinary linguistic and epistemic justice research.

The centre has three strands:

1. Minoritisation, Identity, and Ideology: forms of linguistic and social marginalisation and exclusion as discourse, praxis, and lived experience
2. Contact Zones: linguistic diversity, endangerment, and multilingualism
3. Language, Affect, and Wellbeing: language in contexts of trauma, conflict, loss, and their implications for research ethics

The two overlapping questions addressed by the research centre are:

• How are forms of domination and resistance conveyed through discourse and multi-modal forms of interaction?
• How can we address through socio-linguistically informed cross-disciplinary research the impact of uneven local and global power dynamics on social mobility, diversity, equity and inclusion (or lack thereof) in the region as defined below?

The region includes primarily the following geographic and geo-political areas, with an acknowledgement of the fact that it is impossible to limit the regional focus of our investigations to the areas listed here because of historical and current global political and migration flows as well as various types of displacement: Central and South-East Europe, Ukraine, Central and Northern Asia, Russia, the Arctic and the Circum-Polar region; the Caucasus, and the circum-Baltic area.

Principal Investigators: Dr Riitta Valijarvi, Dr Jelena Čalić, Dr Eszter Tarsoly