Student Spotlight: Erin Wiebe & Amanda Shurtliff

The 2019 No Limits Student Conference will be riding the next feminist wave into the University of Nebraska Lincoln on Friday March 8. The conference, taking place in the Nebraska Union’s Heritage Room from 8:00 AM to 6:30 PM, will feature presentations from UNO English Majors. I asked Erin Wiebe and Amanda Shurtliff a few questions about their projects to see what topics the two are ready to tackle. Wiebe will be presenting her sociolinguistic research on young women’s use of ‘like’ in academic register, and Shurtliff will delve into the patriarchal forces present in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway.

Erin’s presentation, titled “The Role of ‘Like’ in the Social Perception of Speakers: The Case of Young Women in the Academic Register,” explores an idea fascinating to the English and Philosophy double major. The presentation developed from research Wiebe performed for her semester project in a Sociolinguistics class. The course, taught by English Professor Frank Bramlett, Ph.D., gave Wiebe the opportunity to explore “how a young woman's use of ‘like’ in the academic register impacted listener perceptions of her.” Register is a linguistic term that is best summarized as the style of speech a person uses in a given context. Wiebe looked at the academic register which “is more formal” and generally has intellectually challenging content. To accomplish her goals, Wiebe recorded women describing their neuroscientific research interests. She also chose to focus on men’s reactions to young female speakers’ use of ‘like’ because “women sometimes find themselves struggling to be taken seriously in professional settings,” especially male-dominated fields.

The inspiration for Wiebe’s project came from personal experience and research interest. She shared that “being a young woman certainly helped motivate me to research this topic” and that she “tend[s] to use ‘like’ a lot.” She expressed a desire to know “how the stylistic choices I make when communicating impact others' perceptions of me.” The problem Wiebe sees with perceptions of ‘like’ are how stigmatized it is and the word’s association with “vapidness and airheadedness,” and that using it in academic discussions might reflect negative on young women. The project, tied in with Wiebe’s philosophical interests in disagreement and intellectual collaboration, occurs during session #2 of the conference.

Amanda Shurtliff a Secondary Education, English, and ESL double major tackles patriarchal forces in her presentation titled “Patriarchal Sickening in Mrs. Dalloway.” Her analysis discusses “how the patriarchal forces in Woolf's novel sickens the characters in the novel to various degrees.” The work was inspired by “a class discussion” in a women’s literature course taught by Kristen Girten, Ph.D. The discussion focused on “the negative forces of the patriarchal social standards,” which result in the death of a male character. With her presentation, she hopes to explore how “heteronormativity can have negative effects on all people.” When people walk away from the presentation, she wants them to be thinking about how patriarchy functions within our society and its negative influence on all kinds of people. Her presentation will occur during session #16, which focuses on masculinity and literature.

Both Amanda Shurtliff and Erin Wiebe were encouraged by their English professors to take their ideas to The 2019 No Limits Student Conference, and we hope you can join them in discussing the forces of gender within society and literature. The event is currently closed to pre-registration, but those who wish to attend can still register in the Fischer Lounge starting at 8:15 am the day of the event. More info can be found here: https://www.unl.edu/wgs/no-limits-2019.