Events

LARG News Item

Oct 2013

Dr. Diana Eades is stepping down as one of the original co-convenors of LARG. Diana has been active in LADO since 2003, when she attended the first conference session on LADO in Honolulu, and took part in the founding of the Language & National Origin Group and the drafting of the 2004 Guidelines for the Use of Language Analysis in relation to Questions of National Origin in Refugee Cases. She also published early and influential pieces on LADO (Eades et al 2003, 2004; Eades 2005) as well as commenting on its more recent development (Eades 2009, 2010a, 2010b). Diana is currently devoting her time to the broader issues of language in the legal context for which she has been recognized since the 1980s, including in her focus the situation of Australian Aboriginal speakers of varieties of English in the criminal justice process. She will continue to assist LARG as a member of the Advisory Panel.

Prof. Peter L. Patrick continues as a co-convenor of LARG.

Prof. Monika Schmid joins LARG as a co-convenor. She is well-known among linguists for her research on first language attrition (change, deterioration and stability in the native language of migrants who become dominant speakers of the language of their new environment), and has studied this phenomenon in German, Dutch, Moroccan Arabic and Turkish speakers. Monika has authored reports as an expert linguist in asylum appeals involving LADO, especially language attrition cases, in the Netherlands. She has recently moved to the University of Essex, and previously taught at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, where she retains a part-time position. She has authored numerous research articles and books on language acquisition, multilingualism, and psycholinguistics, including Language Attrition (2013, John Benjamins) with Barbara Kopke, and First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance: The case of German Jews in Anglophone countries (2002, John Benjamins).

Dr. Karin M. Zwaan also joins LARG as a co-convenor. Karin is the academic coordinator of the Centre for Migration Law, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She studied law at Utrecht University, and then taught State and Administrative Law there. Karin's PhD thesis at the Law Faculty of the University of Nijmegen (2003) concerned the safe-third-country exception, and she teaches Dutch migration law and refugee law there. Karin has published widely on refugee issues, including UNHCR and the European Asylum Law (2005 Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers). She has convened colloquia and edited books on The Qualification Directive: Central Themes, Problem Issues, and Implementation in Selected Member States  (2007 Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers), on The Procedures Directive... (2008 Nijmegen: WLP), and on the use of LADO in Dutch asylum proceedings (De taalanalyse in de Nederlandse asielprocedure: Een juridische en linguistische verkenning, Nijmegen: WLP 2008). She also co-organized the influential 2010 European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop on Language and origin: The role of language in European asylum procedures with Pieter Muysken and Maaike Verrips, and together they edited the proceedings volume of that name (WLP 2010).