1st LLIMU Symposium: October 29, 2025
The first symposium on Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference, and the Monolingual University was held at UBC in the IKBLC Peña Room. Co-sponsored by the UBC Strategic Equity and Anti-Racism Enhancement Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this day-long event featured multiple speakers alongside work sessions and discussions.
9:00 Welcome
9:15 Moberley Luger (30 min talk)
Moberley Luger is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of English Language and Literatures and Chair of the Coordinated Arts Program at UBC. Her research has generally focused on contemporary American poetry and its relation to crisis and memory; more recently, her scholarship has turned toward pedagogy and she is exploring pedagogies of poetry, considering methods for incorporating cultural studies of poetry into the classroom. Moberley is also working on several initiatives to promote equity in scholarly communication at UBC, including through the development of her TLEF-funded online teaching resource the PASS (Precedents Archive for Scholarly Speaking). She has articles published in English Studies in Canada, Memory Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Pedagogy, Contemporary Literature, Discourse and Writing/ Rédactologie, College English, and the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Moberely is also a proud recipient of a 2023 Killam Teaching Prize.
10:00 Work Session: Linguaphobia
11:00 Nesrine Basheer (30 min talk)
Nesrine Basheer is an applied linguist and a specialist in teaching Arabic as a foreign language (TAFL). Her research interests include the teaching and assessment of writing and the multidialectal approach to teaching Arabic. Nesrine has taught Arabic at the American University in Cairo, the United Nations, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Maryland, and more recently, the University of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is passionate about advancing Arabic first and second language education at the K-12 and tertiary levels.
12:00 Lunch Discussion: Linguistic Indifference
1:00 Marie-Eve Bouchard (30 min talk)
Marie-Eve Bouchard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at UBC. She holds a PhD degree in linguistics from New York University, where she specialized in both sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Marie-Eve is an anthropologically oriented sociolinguist, and tends to enjoy the blurred space between these two fields. In the past few years, her main research project investigated the emerging variety of Portuguese spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Her new research projects focus on different varieties of Canadian French.
- If you are Canadian and a native speaker of French, visit this webpage to participate to the Speaking Atlas of French varieties in Canada: https://frenchdrawl.linguistics.ubc.ca/welcome/fr
- If you want to use the Speaking Atlas of French varieties in Canada, please do so: https://atlas-sonore.fhis.ubc.ca/
- If you want to know more about French in BC, visit this webpage: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/fiches/4823/francophonie-minoritaire-jeune-securite-linguistique-cb
- If you are interested in the development of linguistic security, you can use this educational guide: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EMtswtDHH6C9WFUIBRU0bM032w9eY3S3/view
- For more information, you can visit Marie-Eve’s blog: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mebouchard/
1:45 Work Session: The Monolingual University and a Strategic Plan for Languages 2035
3:00 Closing Circle
Thank you to all guest presenters, attendees, and support people who made the first symposium a success!