Sharpening the lens: enhancing linguistics career prospects in East Africa

This project creates space to train and mentor linguistics ECRs and postgraduate students from East Africa to understand the lifecycle of producing high-quality outputs from research and develop the skills to generate ideas to ensure sustained productivity throughout their careers. This is particularly urgent in contexts where there is little institutional support, few options for local research funding and few incentives for maintaining an active research profile. The focus on East Africa aims to promote Africa-based linguistics research to allow local researchers to engage in global debates and thinking, which in many cases are driven by insights drawn from the multiplicity of languages in the region. The goals are threefold: first, developing writing skills for ECRs and an understanding of the publishing mind-frame; second, building capacity by strengthening research relations through the Language Association of East Africa (LAEA), and third, supporting efforts of regional universities to grow local talent.

Workshop team: Dr Kyle Jerro, University of Essex; Dr Justine Mukhwana Sikuku, Moi University; Professor Nancy Kula, University of Essex; Professor Edith Natukunda Togboa, Makerere University.