IAFLL has received the following nominations for positions on the new IAFLL Executive Committee. Given that only one candidate has been nominated for each of the Officer positions, elections will take place only for the position of Member at Large, which will run for a term of 4 years. There are three Member at Large positions on the Executive Committee, two of which were elected in 2021 and so will carry on in that role until 2025. Therefore, the four candidates below are for one Member at Large position, and when elected will join Andrea Nini and Dana Roemling in that role. Online voting will open for this contested seat on Friday 16th June 2023. Only IAFLL members will be able to vote in this election.
Details of all nominations and the four candidates for Member at Large are available below. In addition to these, as per IAFLL’s Constitution, current Vice President Jennifer Glougie (Labour Relations Board, British Columbia, Canada) will become President automatically at the conclusion of the term of the preceding President. Also in the new Executive Committee, Current President Isabel Picornell (QED Forensic Linguistics, Channel Islands) will sit as a non-voting member of the Committee as immediate past President.
Vice President – Tammy Gales
Dr. Tammy Gales is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Director of Research at the Institute for Forensic Linguistics at Hofstra University, New York. Her research interests cross the boundaries of language and law and forensic linguistics, where she examines how meaning is interpreted in statutes and disputed trademark cases, and how stance manifests in threatening communications, parole board hearings of disadvantaged populations, and cross-examinations of assault victims. She has a background in lexicography and teaching English to non-native and multilingual speakers in a variety of locations, including Greece, California, and the Navajo Nation. She frequently provides linguistic training for law enforcement and legal professionals, works as an expert linguist on civil and criminal cases, and is co-editor of the Elements in Forensic Linguistics series from Cambridge University Press. She is a former member of the IAFL Executive Committee, having served as Publicity Officer and then Secretary from 2017-2021.
Secretary– Felicity Deamer
As a lecturer in Aston’s Institute for Forensic Linguistics (AIFL), my current research uses language analysis to shed light on issues that emerge at the intersection between Law and psychiatry; domains which primarily pursue different social purposes through profoundly different constructs and methodologies, and yet must interact with one another across myriad legal proceedings. My work explores a broad range of linguistic data including expert psychiatric reports submitted as evidence during murder trials, police interviews, 999 calls, and bodycam footage from secure mental health wards. Prior to working in a forensic context, I held research fellowships on interdisciplinary mental health research projects. I have used insights from pragmatics and non-literal language use to better understand psychotic symptoms, and have used a variety of methods, from conversation analysis to eye-tracking, to investigate a variety of phenomena, including patient/therapist interactions and metaphor comprehension in psychosis.
Communications Officer– David Wright
Dr David Wright is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He has held the position of IAFLL Communications Officer for two years and in that time has overseen the rebranding of IAFLL, the development of a new website and the establishment of IAFLL’s Early Career Network, all of which are on-track to be rolled out in Spring/Summer 2023. David wishes to stand for re-election as Communications Officer for second term to encourage a seamless embedding of these changes for the IAFLL community. If successful, David’s focus for a second term would be on increasing our membership base and promoting regional IAFLL-related activity, particularly in those geographical areas in which forensic and legal linguistics are beginning to emerge or that have been typically under-represented.
Treasurer – Annina Heini
I have been a member of IAFLL since 2017 and currently work as a postdoctoral research associate at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, Birmingham. My primary research interest is the language of police interviews, with a special focus on adolescent suspects and age-based vulnerability. In terms of methods, I use Conversation Analysis to qualitatively examine naturally occurring language. My secondary research focus is authorship analysis, specifically individual language use across different discourse types. In this context I am involved in the Centre for Forensic Text Analysis’ ‘100 Idiolects’ project, where we are currently examining how individuals use language to conduct Google searches.
Over the past 8 years I have acted on a number of committees, including as President of the Aston Postgraduate Research Society and as an organiser on various event planning committees.
Member-at-Large – Four candidates (for one contested seat)
1. David Griffin
I am an American attorney with a PhD in linguistics whose work has examined the nature of legal language and the semiotics of authority in legal texts. I have been a member of IAFLL since 2017 when, as a master’s student at Cardiff University, I was lucky enough to attend the 13th Biennial Conference in Porto. Since then, I have gone on to lead my own undergraduate module in Forensic Linguistics and worked to bring a greater awareness of the field to legal practitioners. I think of IAFLL as my academic home and would be honored to contribute to it as a Member-at-Large in ways both general and more specifically related to my expertise in language and law.
2. Laura Smith-Khan
Dr Laura Smith-Khan is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. Her research examines minoritized groups’ participation in legal settings, especially in migration processes. In 2022 she won the Max Crawford Medal, Australia’s most prestigious award for achievement and promise in the humanities. She is co-founder of the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network.
Dr Smith-Khan’s current award-winning project explores migration lawyers’ communication, regulation, and education. She has researched extensively on language and credibility in refugee procedures and public discourse, and previously assisted with a ground-breaking multi-country project examining disability in forced migration. She is a member of the Language on the Move research group.
Dr Smith-Khan has been admitted as a lawyer in Australia and worked with refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants in a pro-bono and paralegal capacity. She has qualifications in law, languages, linguistics, and international relations.
3. Eliseu Mabasso
Eliseu Mabasso is Associate Prof. at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) and holds a Ph.D in Applied Linguistics (forensic linguistics) and also a Masters of Letters (Mlitt) in the same field from the University of Sydney, Australia. He teaches Applied Linguistics and Language and Law for both undergraduates and post-graduate students. He also teaches Forensic Linguistics for Master Courses at the country’s only Police College (ACIPOL). He is particularly interested in the field of police investigative interviewing and in cross-language and cross-cultural communication. Prof Mabasso is known for being the first national to establish a major in Language and Law for linguistics undergraduate students at UEM, and probably the only offered in the whole country. He has published several papers in local and international journals and also chapters in forensic linguistics related books. Prof. Mabasso has held several positions at UEM and is currently the Rector’s Adviser for Collegiate Bodies.
4. Rachelle Lintao
Dr. Rachelle Lintao is a full professor at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) in Manila, the Philippines. She is the incumbent chair of the UST Department of English and program lead of the English Language Studies at the UST Graduate School. She is also a research associate at the UST Research Center for Social Sciences and Education (RCSSED). As a plain language advocate, Rachelle is Clarity’s country representative in the Philippines and serves as a judge of the ClearMark Awards in recognizing plain language communication written for consumers in North American organizations. She is the Vice-President of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines (LSP) and a volunteer English trainer of the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education (FUSE). Her research interests include forensic linguistics, online discourses, corpus linguistics, language and technology, and language education.
Click here for full details of IAFLL’s Executive Committee and IAFLL’s Constitution.