Join us for a live and online debate, for which we’ve assembled an expert panel of leading academics and practitioners to discuss the latest research on how languages and gender intersect to shape our world. During this lively and live discussion, Rosie Goldsmith, language champion, journalist and founder of the European Literature Network, will lead a discussion with fellow linguists to reveal:

1. How gender stereotyping in schools impacts subject-choice and society on the whole
2. How different languages are changing to accommodate gender neutrality and non-binary pronouns
3. How gendered languages impact the way we think, feel and shape our identities
4. Suggestions for teaching and teachers, policy, advocacy and more

Rosie will be joined by Sandra Takei and Donata Puntil from King’s College London, Sascha Stollhans of the Goethe-Institut in Nancy, France and Ártemis López of queerterpreter.com and the University of Vigo in Spain.

Powered by John Murray Learning, home of Teach Yourself and the Michel Thomas Method, and in association with Language Acts and Worldmaking and King’s College London.

Join the debate. Follow @tyopenroad and use the hashtag #LanguageDebates to follow the discussion around significant ways to transform our relationship with languages and with the world around us.

Rosie Goldsmith is a former BBC journalist, writer, presenter and director of the European Literature Network

Rosie Goldsmith is an award-winning journalist specializing in arts and foreign affairs. In twenty years at the BBC she travelled the world and presented several flagship programmes. Rosie is a linguist and has lived in Europe, Africa and the USA. Today she combines journalism with chairing and curating literary events and festivals for leading cultural organisations. Known as a champion of international literature, translation and language learning, she promotes them whenever she can. She is Founder and Director of the European Literature Network and created The Riveter magazine. From 2018-2020 she was Chair of the Judges of the EBRD Literature Prize, honouring authors and translators equally.

Donata Puntil is a Programme Director at the Modern Language Centre - King’s College London where she is responsible for staff development and intercultural education. Donata has an extensive teaching in Italian as Foreign Language and in supervising and training language teachers. She is also a researcher in Second Language Acquisition, Language Education and Intercultural Studies. She presented papers at national and international conferences on the above subjects with a particular focus on the role culture plays in language teaching; her research interests are also drawing from feminist studies, philosophy and psychoanalysis with a particular focus on issues of language and identity & language and gender. She is currently completing a PhD investigating language teachers’ identity and professional trajectories within a posthuman and post-qualitative onto-epistemological framework. Donata is also an accredited Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist practicing this profession on a part-time basis and she is member of the BPC (British Psychoanalytic Association).

Sascha Stollhans (he/him/his) is an educational consultant (“Experte für Unterricht”) at the Goethe-Institut in Nancy, France. A linguist and language teacher by trade, he has held various academic positions at languages and linguistics departments in the UK. He specialises in applied linguistics for language teaching, teacher training, digital teaching and learning, educational policy as well as equality, diversity and inclusion in the language classroom. His work on language variation in the classroom has been discussed in National Geographic and Times Higher Education, and he has delivered a number of workshops on gender-inclusive language for MFL teachers, academics as well as translators and interpreters.

Sandra Takei completed her PhD in Education Research at King’s College London in 2021. Her PhD researched post-16 subject choice in England and compared factors influencing student participation in physics and modern languages. The research focused on the role of education policy and school practices in shaping student and teacher identities. She is currently working as a Senior Teaching Fellow at King’s College London.

Ártemis López (artemis@queerterpreter.com, they/elle) is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the Universidade de Vigo in Galiza, Spain, where they research non-binary Spanish. They hold a M.A. in medical translation from the Universitat Jaume I, also in Spain, and have been translating and interpreting professionally for over a decade.