Workable Accents: How International Teaching Assistants Vocally Fashion and Contest Academic Labor

(Hardback)

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An in-depth exploration of how international teaching assistants (ITAs) make their accents workable to fulfill their duties as academic laborers.

In this book, workable refers not only to manipulating an accent, but also to ensuring that an accent achieves certain objectives such as being perceived as an intelligible speaker, an expert educator, and an acceptable worker. Drawing on commentaries from ITAs working in Canadian universities, Vijay A. Ramjattan highlights how crafting a workable accent is not an apolitical endeavor, but rather a practice that works within and against the various communicative affordances of neoliberal academia. Just as it can involve fashioning ones voice to satisfy oppressive communication norms, a workable accent can also contest these norms to varying degrees. Ramjattan ultimately demonstrates that (academic) institutions must do a better job at addressing how vocally marginalized workers are heard at work.

Author Bio

Vijay A. Ramjattan is Assistant Professor in the Language and Literacies Education department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.