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Dr Judith Baxter

Judith Baxter

Head of English

Room:   MB733A
Phone:  0121 204 3399
Fax:      0121 204 3766
E-mail:  j.a.baxter@aston.ac.uk

I studied English and History at the University of East Anglia and qualified as a teacher at the University of Cambridge. I gained a Masters Degree in Educational Studies at the University of Surrey and gained my PhD at the University of Reading, where I subsequently taught Applied Linguistics.

My current research focus is on the relationship between language, gender and leadership in educational, business and professional contexts. I am conducting an ESRC research project entitled ‘Leadership Talk and Gender in Senior Management Business Meetings in the UK’, which runs from September 1st 2009 until January 2011. 

For further information, please visit the project blog. I have recently published a monograph, The Language of Female Leadership, with Palgrave Macmillan.

Qualifications

  • BA (Hons) English and History, University of East Anglia,
  • M.Sc. Educational Studies, University of Surrey
  • PhD Applied Linguistics, University of Reading
  • PGCE in Secondary English, University of Cambridge
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

Undergraduate Teaching

  • Management Styles of Writing
  • Discourse Analysis for Business

  • PhD supervision

Responsibilities

  • Convenor of the Business Communication strand on the BA International Business and Management programme.

  • LSS English Representative on Senate

Research 

Research interests

  • Language and gender
  • Post-structuralist discourse analysis
  • Language of the workplace
  • Leadership language in business contexts
  • Classroom language
  • Semiotic and media language   

Recent research funding

  • ‘Leadership Talk and Gender in Senior Management Business Meetings in the UK’. £85,000 from ESRC (September 1st 2009 until January 2011).
  • 'English Language at undergraduate level: its place within UK Higher Education in the 21st century': Dr Judith Baxter and Dr Denise Santos, £2,000 from the Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies Subject Centre (LLAS; April - December 2007)

Membership of professional bodies

  • The Gender and Language Association (IGALA)
  • British Association of Applied Linguists (BAAL)
  • The ESRC Peer Review College


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Speaking out Female Voices in Public Contexts

Selected publications 

Books

  • The Language of Female Leadership. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

  • Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts.(ed)Palgrave: Macmillan, 2006
  • Positioning Gender in Discourse: A feminist methodology. Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003

  • Making Gender Work. The University of Reading: The National Centre for Language and Literacy, 2001.  
The Language of Female Leadership
Positioning Gender in Discourse

Articles

  • ‘Women of the Corporation: a sociolinguistic perspective of senior women’s leadership language in the UK.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16/1: 81 – 107, 2012.
  • ‘Survival or success?: A critical exploration of the use of ‘double-voiced discourse’ by women business leaders in the UK.’ Discourse and Communication, 231 -246, 2011.
  • ‘‘I’m not going to talk to whatever her name is’: Constructing professional identities through male solidarity and female exclusion in builders’ discourse.’ (with K. Wallace) Discourse & Society 20 (4): 411-29, 2009.
  • ‘Constructions of active womanhood and new femininities: From a feminist linguistic perspective, is Sex and the City a modernist or a post-modernist TV text?’ Women and Language, 30 (2): 91-7, 2009.
  • ‘Is it all tough talking at the top? A post-structuralist analysis of the construction of gendered speaker identities of British business leaders within interview narratives.’ Gender and Language, Vol 1 (4):197-22, 2008
  • 'Jokers in the Pack: why boys are more adept than girls at speaking in public.’ Language & Education , 16, 2, pp. 81-96, 2002
  • Competing discourses in the classroom: a post-structuralist analysis of girls' and boys' speech in public contexts.’ Discourse & Society 13, 6, pp. 827-842, 2002
  • ‘Is PDA really an alternative? A reply to West.’ Discourse & Society 13 (6), pp. 853-859, 2002
  • ‘A Juggling Act: a feminist post-structuralist analysis of girls' and boys' talk in the secondary classroom.’ Gender & Education 14, 1, 5-19, 2002
  • Going Public: teaching students to speak out in public contexts.’ NATE: English in Education 34 (2), pp. 26-34, 2002

Chapters

  • ‘Feminist research’. In C.A. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of Applied Linguistics: Qualitative Methods. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
  • ‘Gender’ in J. Simpson (ed.) The Handbook of Applied Linguistics. London: Routledge (2011)
  • ‘Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis in Language and Gender Research: Approaches in Dialogue.’ Co-authored with Ann Weatherall, Maria Stubbe and Jane Sunderland. In J. Holmes and M. Marra (eds.) Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.
  • 'Discourse-analytic approaches to text and talk'. In L. Litosseliti (ed.) Research Methods in Linguistics. London: Continuum, 2010.
  • Feminist Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis: a new theoretical and methodological approach? In J. Sunderland et al, Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Gender and Language Study. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 243-55, 2008
  • Post-structuralist analysis of classroom discourse. In M. Martin-Jones & A.M. de Mejia, Encyclopaedia of Language and Education: Discourse and Education, Vol 3. New York: Springer, 2007
  •  'Do we have to agree with her?' How high school girls negotiate leadership in public contexts. In J. Baxter (ed.) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts. Palgrave: Macmillan, pp. 159-178, 2006
  • Putting gender in its place: constructing speaker identities in management meetings. In M. Barrett & M.J. Davidson (eds) Gender and Communications at Work. Aldershot : Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2005  

Magazine articles and reports

  • ‘Undergraduate English Language: a subject in search of an identity? Liaison 2: January 2009.
  • ‘The Language of Female Leadership’. Research Review, Issue 7, Winter 2008-9.
  • 'English Language at undergraduate level: its place within UK Higher Education in the 21st century'. (with Denise Santos) Southampton University: LLAS, 2008  

Recent conference and seminar papers

  • Double-voiced Discourse: Gendered ways of enacting leadership discourse in UK business meetings.’ Research seminar held at the School of Education, University of Reading, July 2011.

  • ‘Survival or success? Gendered ways of enacting leadership discourse in UK business meetings.’ Research seminar held at the School of Education, University of Birmingham, February 2011.

  • ‘Emerging impact, emerging theory: an ESRC research study on gender and the language of leadership’. Research seminar held at the School of English, University of Birmingham, November 2010.

  • ‘Survival or success? Gendered ways of enacting leadership discourse in UK business meetings.’ Research seminar held at The University of West England, October 2010.

  • Global archetypes or local practices?: A study of the language of women business leaders in the UK. The British Association of Applied Linguists Annual Meeting, University of Aberdeen, September 2010.

  • ‘Women leaders as archetypes? Challenging the discursive boundaries’. Paper given on ‘Women in Leadership: A Discourse Perspective’. Event held at Aston University, June 2010.

  • ‘What can a sociolinguistic perspective contribute to an understanding of leadership discourse?’ Research seminar held in the Aston Business School, Aston University, May 2010.

Media Activity

  • ‘Women Told to Speak their Minds to Get on in Boardroom’, article on my research by Daniel Boffey on 19.6.2011.

  • A radio interview for the BBC Radio World Service Business Daily 18.6.2011.

  •  An interview for Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on 26.7.2011.