Past events
Phd Defence Hanne Verhaegen: “Dutch gender-inclusive pronouns: investigating perceived text quality, mental representations and attitudes”
September 14 2026, Ghent
“Gender and language: Lessons from a decade of research on gender-inclusive pronouns”
Meet the expert workshop by Prof. Dr. Emma A. Renström
September 14 2026, Ghent
Prof. Emma A. Renström, Professor of Psychology at Kristianstad University, Sweden, will deliver an interactive lecture on empirical research into gender-inclusive and non-binary pronouns. Drawing on extensive research on the Swedish gender-inclusive pronoun hen, and English they, the lecture will examine how such pronouns are perceived, which social and cognitive associations they activate, and how they influence mental gender representations.
A central focus of the lecture will be methodological approaches used to study language attitudes and social perception, including experimental designs and survey-based research. These methods are directly transferable to research on other languages and to broader questions in language, cognition, and social inequality.
By combining empirical findings with methodological reflection, the lecture will provide participants with concrete tools for studying language and gender, while situating gender-inclusive pronouns within wider societal debates on inclusivity, equality, and linguistic change.
Register here: https://event.ugent.be/registration/event/genderinclusivepronouns
Specialist course, Ghent, June 6-7 2024: Gender and Language Across Europe
This course will take place on campus Mercator on June 6th and 7th 2024. It aims at presenting recent findings from gender and language research in multiple European languages and across disciplines, with a special focus on (but not limited to) gender-inclusive and nonbinary pronouns. In doing so, the course will cover a variety of approaches and methodologies from different disciplines, including psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic ethnography