Cecilia Gialdini

On May 29th my friend and amazing colleague Nicole Marinaro and I were guests at the Linguistic Justice Society’s online seminar series. Our talk was titled Linguistic Justice In Healthcare: Macro and Micro Perspectives and we address language barriers an access to healthcare from the policy-makers’ and speakers’ perspective.

Extensive medical research confirms the detrimental consequences of communication issues in healthcare contexts, supporting the employment of bilingual healthcare staff and/or the provision of professional translation and interpreting services. This presentation addresses linguistic justice in healthcare from a macro and micro point of view, adopting perspectives pertaining to the realms of social policy and sociolinguistics.

 In social policy, linguistic justice is conceptualised as a parameter to measure the fairness of language policies. Cecilia presents an instrument to evaluate healthcare policies to address the state’s performance. Inspired by the capability approach, access to healthcare is defined as a language-based capability and assessed through a synthetic indicator that allows cross-country comparison.

As regards the field of sociolinguistics, Nicole discusses the application to the medical domain of the concept of linguistic unease, “a situation in which speakers feel that their pragmatic linguistic competence is not fitting the communicative requirements of the linguistic act they are about to perform – or even that the symbolic value of their speech acts is perceived as misplaced” [1]. Examining the patterns of linguistic unease from a subject-centred perspective can allow us to identify and target issues related to sociolinguistic justice in relevant societies.

You can catch up our talk on the Youtube channel of the Society:

Also, be sure to check out Nicole’s work and keep in touch with her:

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References

[1] Iannàccaro, G., Dell’Aquila, V. & Gobbo, F. (2018) The assessment of sociolinguistic justice: parameters and models of analysis. In: Gazzola M., Wickström, B.-A. & Templin, T. (eds.) Language Policy and Linguistic Justice: Economic, Philosophical and Sociolinguistic Approaches, 363-391. Berlin / New York: Springer.