Lee Murray is a doctoral candidate in linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. They present on linguistics to skeptic groups — who they describe as “evidence-based-reasoning enthusiasts” — and also write a linguistics column called “By Lingo!” for The Big Issue magazine. Lee kindly answered our questions for this LingComm IRL interview, a series edited by Gretchen McCulloch and Leah Velleman highlighting face-to-face, community-driven linguistics communication activities without much of a web presence to help lingcommers learn from each others’ experiences in doing local activities.
How did you get involved in presenting IRL about linguistics?
A friend of a friend asked if I’d give a sociolinguistics talk to a regional skeptic group, and from there I was invited to speak at their national convention, Skepticon. I was an invited speaker at two Australian Skepticon conventions.
What sort of presentation did you give?
My research focuses on the kinds of social decisions we make about each other based on how we talk, which meant I could speak to a skeptic audience about unconscious social biases and how we attach them to ways of speaking.
What are a few specific things you did that really resonated with that audience?
Definitely my Skepticon talk titled “So you’ve corrected someone’s grammar on the internet…”. It was heaps of fun to both write and present, and delegates even told me that I’d changed their minds on the topic and they’d be changing their online behaviour accordingly. (I love it when I get to use my powers for good!)
What’s something you’d do differently next time?
I’d make sure the signal of my slide clicker was strong enough to get through the closed stage door…
(Ask me how I know.)
Where can people find more about you or get in touch if they’re working on a similar project?
You can find me (and contact me) at leemurray.com.au.
LingComm IRL is a series bringing attention to under-documented face-to-face lingcomm projects. Do you know of a great IRL lingcomm project that doesn’t have much if any information about it online yet? Let us know! Does your lingcomm project have a website with information about its structure so other people can use it as a model? Let us know so we can link to it from the LingComm Resources page.
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