Celia Roberts

What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis? This book explores the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic Australian bushfire season of 2019-20 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. This interdisciplinary analysis brings feminist and queer questions about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises.

What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis? This book explores the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic Australian bushfire season of 2019-20 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. This interdisciplinary analysis brings feminist and queer questions about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises.

Linguistic Penalties and the Job Interview looks at a relatively untapped area of language and social life: the role of language and interaction in constructing the job interview and how this role produces disadvantage in the linguistically diverse communities of the western world. It relates the specific activity of the job interview to the wider field of institutional discourse and discusses relevant social theories in the light of the data. The volume considers job interviews as key 'gatekeeping' encounters within the workplace from two main perspectives: interviews as extreme examples of social evaluation, showing how inferential processes of moment to moment talk in interaction can lead to the 'small tragedies' of everyday life; and interviews as a window into social inequality more generally. It illustrates interactional sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnography methodology through the job interview and workplace data and argues for the importance of practical relevance - applying sociolinguistic analysis to educational interventions.

Linguistic Penalties and the Job Interview looks at a relatively untapped area of language and social life: the role of language and interaction in constructing the job interview and how this role produces disadvantage in the linguistically diverse communities of the western world. It relates the specific activity of the job interview to the wider field of institutional discourse and discusses relevant social theories in the light of the data. The volume considers job interviews as key 'gatekeeping' encounters within the workplace from two main perspectives: interviews as extreme examples of social evaluation, showing how inferential processes of moment to moment talk in interaction can lead to the 'small tragedies' of everyday life; and interviews as a window into social inequality more generally. It illustrates interactional sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnography methodology through the job interview and workplace data and argues for the importance of practical relevance - applying sociolinguistic analysis to educational interventions.

As individuals increasingly seek ways of accessing, understanding and sharing data about their own bodies, this book offers a critique of the popular claim that ‘more information’ equates to ‘better health’. In a study that redefines the public, academic and policy related debates around health, bodies, information and data, the authors consider the ways in which the phenomenon of self-diagnosis has created alternative worlds of knowledge and practises which are often at odds with professional medical advice. With a focus on data that concerns significant life changes, this book explores the potential challenges related to people’s changing relationships with traditional health systems as access to, and control over, data shifts.

Langauge and Discrimination provides a unique and authoritative study of the linguistic dimension of racial discrimination. Based upon extensive work carried out over many years by the Industrial Language Training Service in the U.K, this illuminating analysis argues that a real understanding of how language functions as a means of indirect racial discrimination must be founded on an expanded view of language which recognises the inseparability of language, culture and meaning.After initially introducing the subject matter of the book and providing an overview of discrimination and language learning, the authors examine the relationship between theory and practice in four main areas: theories of interaction and their application; ethnographic and linguistic analysis of workplace settings; training in communication for white professionals; and language training for adult bilingual workers and job-seekers. Detailed case studies illustrate how theory can be turned into practice if appropriate information, research, development and training and co-ordinated in an integrated response to issues of multi-ethnic communication, discrimination and social justice.

Puberty has long been recognised as a difficult and upsetting process for individuals and families, but it is now also being widely described as in crisis. Reportedly occurring earlier and earlier as each decade of the twenty-first century passes, sexual development now heralds new forms of temporal trouble in which sexuality, sex/gender and reproduction are all at stake. Many believe that children are growing up too fast and becoming sexual too early. Clinicians, parents and teachers all demand something must be done. Does this out-of-time development indicate that children's futures are at risk or that we are entering a new era of environmental and social perturbation? Engaging with a diverse range of contemporary feminist and social theories on the body, biology and sex, Celia Roberts urges us to refuse a discourse of crisis and to rethink puberty as a combination of biological, psychological and social forces.

This is a detailed study of understanding in a second language, related to the actual lives of minority workers. The focus is on everyday interactions between these workers and the bureaucrats of the society in which they are now resident. It provides an important contribution to the debate about the function of language as a social practice, adding a new perspective to the psycholinguistic and experimental paradigms, currently existing in second language acquisition research.

Since the early twentieth century, hormones have commonly been understood as 'messengers of sex'. They are seen as essential to the development and functioning of healthy reproductive male and female bodies; millions take them as medications in the treatment of fertility, infertility and ageing. However, in contemporary society, hormones are both disturbed and disturbing; invading our environments and bodies through plastics, food and water, environmental estrogens and other chemicals, threatening irreversible, inter-generational bodily change. Using a wide range of sources, from physiology textbooks to popular parenting books and pharmaceutical advertisements, Celia Roberts analyses the multiple ways in which sex hormones have come to matter to us today. Bringing feminist theories of the body into dialogue with science and technology studies, she develops tools to address one of the most important questions facing feminism today: how is biological sex conceivable?

Since the early twentieth century, hormones have commonly been understood as 'messengers of sex'. They are seen as essential to the development and functioning of healthy reproductive male and female bodies; millions take them as medications in the treatment of fertility, infertility and ageing. However, in contemporary society, hormones are both disturbed and disturbing; invading our environments and bodies through plastics, food and water, environmental estrogens and other chemicals, threatening irreversible, inter-generational bodily change. Using a wide range of sources, from physiology textbooks to popular parenting books and pharmaceutical advertisements, Celia Roberts analyses the multiple ways in which sex hormones have come to matter to us today. Bringing feminist theories of the body into dialogue with science and technology studies, she develops tools to address one of the most important questions facing feminism today: how is biological sex conceivable?

Are new reproductive and genetic technologies racing ahead of a society that is unable to establish limits to their use? Have the "new genetics" outpaced our ability to control their future applications? This book examines the case of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the procedure used to prevent serious genetic disease by embryo selection, and the so-called "designer baby" method. Using detailed empirical evidence, the authors show that far from being a runaway technology, the regulation of PGD over the past fifteen years provides an example of precaution and restraint, as well as continual adaptation to changing social circumstances. Through interviews, media and policy analysis, and participant observation at two PGD centers in the United Kingdom, Born and Made provides an in-depth sociological examination of the competing moral obligations that define the experience of PGD. Among the many novel findings of this pathbreaking ethnography of reproductive biomedicine is the prominence of uncertainty and ambivalence among PGD patients and professionals--a finding characteristic of the emerging "biosociety," in which scientific progress is inherently paradoxical and contradictory. In contrast to much of the speculative futurology that defines this field, Born and Made provides a timely and revealing case study of the on-the-ground decision-making that shapes technological assistance to human heredity.

This book looks at the role of cultural studies and intercultural communication in language learning. The book argues that learners who have an opportunity to stay in the target language country can be trained to do an ethnographic project while abroad. Borrowing from anthropologists' the idea of cultural fieldwork and 'writing culture', language learners develop their linguistic and cultural competence through the study of a local group. This book combines a theoretical overview of language and cultural practices with a description of ethnographic approaches and materials specifically designed for language learners.

This book looks at the role of cultural studies and intercultural communication in language learning. The book argues that learners who have an opportunity to stay in the target language country can be trained to do an ethnographic project while abroad. Borrowing from anthropologists' the idea of cultural fieldwork and 'writing culture', language learners develop their linguistic and cultural competence through the study of a local group. This book combines a theoretical overview of language and cultural practices with a description of ethnographic approaches and materials specifically designed for language learners.