In this episode of Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Cindy Valdez, an English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) specialist, and Founder & CEO of Teach To Learn, an international education exchange program.

Cindy is passionate about inclusion, helping other educators develop leadership in EAL/D and cater for the academic and wellbeing needs of multilingual learners, including students from refugee backgrounds. She is an author of professional publications, served as President of the Association for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ATESOL) NSW and is Member of the Board of Directors of Primary English Teaching Association of Australia known as PETAA.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Zoe Avery, a Worimi woman and a Research Officer at the Centre for Australian Languages within the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Zoe and her teammates are preparing the upcoming 4th National Indigenous Languages Survey. This time around, the AIATSIS team have made some really important changes to the survey design through a co-design process which we will discuss. The survey will be conducted in late 2025 to 2026 and reported upon in 2026.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks writer, illustrator, filmmaker and Academy Award winner Shaun Tan. Shaun is best known for illustrated books that deal with social and historical subjects through dream-like imagery. His books have been widely translated throughout the world and enjoyed by readers of all ages.

In the episode, Brynn and Shaun discuss his award-winning 2006 book The Arrival, which is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images. In the book, a man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.

For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see Life in a New Language, Discrimination by any other name: Language tests and racist immigration policy in Australia, Intercultural Communication – Now in the third edition, and Judging Refugees.

If you liked this episode, be sure to say hello to Brynn and Language on the Move on Bluesky!

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Sari Pietikainen about her new book Cold Rush (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment - working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended.

This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes.

Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change.

The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Vaughan Rapatahana about sexual predation in the English language teaching industry.

The conversation addresses his new book Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024), which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation.

Trigger warning: this show discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners may find distressing.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Loy Lising speaks with Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller about the 3rd edition of her best-selling textbook Intercultural Communication (Edinburgh UP, 2025).

A comprehensive and critical overview of the field of intercultural communication

Combining perspectives from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the third edition of this popular textbook provides students with an up-to-date overview of the field of intercultural communication. Ingrid Piller explains communication in context using two main approaches. The first treats cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. The second, informed by multilingualism studies, highlights the use and prestige of different languages and language varieties as well as the varying access that speakers have to them.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Dr Zozan Balci about Zozan’s new book, Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, Identity and Belonging in the Lives of Cultural In-betweeners, published in 2025 by Routledge..

The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their childhoods and lives today, exploring how visible racial differences from the mainstream, social power, emotions, and familial relationships continue to shape their use – or erasure – of their linguistic heritage.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Esther Monzó-Nebot, Associate Professor in Translation and Interpreting Studies at Universitat Jaume I in Catalunya. They talk about Dr. Monzó-Nebot's new book The Social Impact of Automating Translation: An Ethics of Care Perspective on Machine Translation.

The conversation delves into ideological issues involved in the widespread use of machine translation and the real-life impact for those who may rely on machine translations in various situations. Esther’s research and the wide variety of contributions to the book highlight the need to open a discussion about instilling an ‘ethics of care’ perspective into the use of technology to make AI-generated translations more inclusive and relevant for the communities using them.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho. Dr. Cho has guested on this show previously, and she is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Her research cuts across translation and interpreting and sociolinguistics, with a focus on language ideologies, language policies and intercultural communication.

In this episode, Brynn and Dr. Cho discuss Dr. Cho’s new book, Multilingual Practices and Monolingual Mindsets: Critical Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Health Care Interpreting. With a novel approach, which sees interpreting as social activities infused with power, Dr. Cho’s research and this book have captured the dynamics of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic power relations in diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital, Life in a New Language, Linguistic Inclusion in Public Health Communications and Interpreting service provision is good value for money.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, PhD FAHA, Humboldt Professor
Linguistics Department, Macquarie University & Fakultät für Erziehungswissenschaft, Universität Hamburg
Language on the Move
Life in a New Language
Intercultural Communication (3rd ed.)
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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Leah Karliner. Dr. Karliner is Professor in Residence in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco in the United States. She is Director of the Center for Aging in Diverse Communities and Director of the Multiethnic Health Equity Research Center. She is both a practicing general internist and a health services researcher, with expertise in practice-based and communication research. An important aspect of her scholarly work centres on improving quality of care for patients with limited English proficiency, and the goal of her research agenda is aimed at achieving health equity through improved communication and clinical outcomes.

In this episode, Brynn and Leah discuss a 2024 paper that Leah co-authored entitled “Language Access Systems Improvement initiative: impact on professional interpreter utilisation, a natural experiment”. The paper details a study that investigated two ways of improving the quality of clinical care for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients in English-dominant healthcare contexts, by:

Brynn and Leah talk about the results of this study and what they mean for improved communication with LEP patients in healthcare.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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