Academics across Canada, an officially bilingual and multicultural country, devote a lot of attention to diversity and representation. This is particularly true for political scientists. In this research note, we focus on the linguistic composition of panels and overall linguistic fragmentation of the most important in-person event for Canadian political science: the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). To do so, we generated a dataset based on the official program of the 2023 annual conference. Our main results are twofold. First, we find an important under-representation of French-speaking events and academic communications (i.e., panels and papers). Second, we computed Herfindahl-Hirschman indexes demonstrating that francophone-dominated panels and co-authored papers with francophone first authors are significantly more linguistically diverse than anglophone panels and papers. Our results highlight important blind spots in Canadian political science and help make sense of the lack of representation of French-language work in Canadian academia.

The representation of Canada's two main linguistic groups in the teaching of Canadian politics is crucial, but we know little about it. In this article, we analyze the systemic underrepresentation of francophone authors in Canadian political science by examining the research that students are exposed to. Based on data from 351 syllabi across 42 Canadian universities, as well as data from the reading list of the doctoral qualifying field exams in Canadian politics, our findings show that francophone authors are systemically underrepresented (when not totally absent). About 38 per cent of Canadian politics courses include no francophone authors in their reading lists. Our findings suggest that Canadian politics is not an inclusive and comprehensive field. This result entails important implications not only for current professors and students but also for the profession more generally, given that the students who will make up tomorrow's faculties in Canadian universities are shaped by these biases.

There is growing interest in conceptualizing and diagnosing frailty. Less is understood, however, about older adults’ perceptions of the term “frail”, and the implications of being classified as “frail”. The purpose of this scoping review was to map the breadth of primary studies; and describe the meaning, perceptions, and perceived implications of frailty language amongst community-dwelling older adults. Eight studies were included in the review and three core themes were identified: (1) understanding frailty as inevitable age-related decline in multiple domains, (2) perceiving frailty as a generalizing label, and (3) perceiving impacts of language on health and health care utilization. Clinical practice recommendations for health care professionals working with individuals with frailty include: (1) maintaining a holistic view of frailty that extends beyond physical function to include psychosocial and environmental constructs, (2) using person-first language, and (3) using a strengths-based approach to discuss aspects of frailty.

In this project, I use the LGBT movement in Italy as a case study to investigate how social movements in culturally diverse social environments strategically employ contentious language to develop discourses that maximize cultural and policy outcomes without encountering discursive fragmentation. My research shows that supporters of LGBT civil rights in different Italian regions relied on a tactical use of particular words in order to respond to regionally specific norms of cultural expression regulating the boundaries drawn around the concept of family. Taking a cultural and linguistic approach to the study of social movements, I present the mechanism of asymmetrical metonymy as an example of the strategic use of polysemic language to achieve discursive convergence through culturally specific tactics, and I argue that discourse and rhetorical analysis offer a way to understand how movements make sense of different cultural limitations in a fragmented social environment.