OUR KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Jayanthi Kuru-Utumpala
#ClimbLikeAGirl
Challenging Gender Stereotypes to Reach the Top
As the first Sri Lankan to summit Mount Everest, I will draw on the gendered aspects of climbing Everest as a woman, and as a woman from the global south. I will talk about the gender stereotypes that I had to face (and continue to face) both locally in Sri Lanka, as well as internationally, by drawing from a range of examples before, during and after my journey to Everest. I will also reflect on how the 'personal is political' and how this journey, although a deeply personal one for me, has impacted the lives of many others, in ways that I never imagined it would.
Prof. Dr. Claudia Posch
A half-witted Woman found her way across from the West Coast
Researching Gender Representation in Mountaineering Corpora with a Corpus and Discourse Approach
This talk aims to demonstrate how the relationship between language and gender can be empirically investigated and analyzed within large datasets. Mountaineering texts have been relatively overlooked in discourse studies so far, even though the topic has always been highly political. The data consist of several heritage corpora of mountaineering texts from different Alpine club journals. I will look at frequently occurring patterns and typical ways of how gendered language is produced within the corpora, e.g. how are the binary categories “female” and “male” linguistically produced and reinforced in these texts? To address these questions, standard corpus linguistic methods are employed. These procedures reveal salient patterns of gender referencing, which are subsequently interpreted with the background of discourse analysis.
Thom Pollard
tba
In his talk Thom Pollard will speak about the shifts that mountaineering (and especially climbing Everest) has undergone in recent years. Drawing upon his extensive adventure career, Thom shares his most intimate experiences as a filmmaker and climber and will reflect on the history of Mount Everest and of scaling the highest peak.