Episodes

  • Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission

    Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission
    Feb 25 2026
    In this episode of Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah talks to Dr. Laura Rademaker (Australian National University), the author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission. The conversation explores the distinctive historical context of Australia’s Northern Territory as a location for Christian missionary activity. Tazin and Laura talk about the multiple tensions and elements involved in language interactions between monolingual English-speaking missionaries and multilingual Indigenous communities, against the background of settler colonialism. Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission was published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. About the book Found in Translation is a rich account of language and shifting cross-cultural relations on a Christian mission in northern Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how translation shaped interactions between missionaries and the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of the Groote Eylandt archipelago and how each group used language to influence, evade, or engage with the other in a series of selective “mistranslations.” In particular, this work traces the Angurugu mission from its establishment by the Church Missionary Society in 1943, through Australia’s era of assimilation policy in the 1950s and 1960s, to the introduction of a self-determination policy and bilingual education in 1973. While translation has typically been an instrument of colonization, this book shows that the ambiguities it creates have given Indigenous people opportunities to reinterpret colonization’s position in their lives. Laura Rademaker combines oral history interviews with careful archival research and innovative interdisciplinary findings to present a fresh, cross-cultural perspective on Angurugu mission life. Exploring spoken language and sound, the translation of Christian scripture and songs, the imposition of English literacy, and Aboriginal singing traditions, she reveals the complexities of the encounters between the missionaries and Aboriginal people in a subtle and sophisticated analysis. Rademaker uses language as a lens, delving into issues of identity and the competition to name, own, and control. In its efforts to shape the Anindilyakwa people’s beliefs, the Church Missionary Society utilized language both by teaching English and by translating Biblical texts into the native tongue. Yet missionaries relied heavily on Anindilyakwa interpreters, whose varied translation styles and choices resulted in an unforeseen Indigenous impact on how the mission’s messages were received. From Groote Eylandt and the peculiarities of the Australian settler-colonial context, Found in Translation broadens its scope to cast light on themes common throughout Pacific mission history such as assimilation policies, cultural exchanges, and the phenomenon of colonization itself. This book will appeal to Indigenous studies scholars across the Pacific as well as scholars of Australian history, religion, linguistics, anthropology, and missiology. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    27 mins
  • Your Languages Are Your Superpower

    Your Languages Are Your Superpower
    Nov 16 2025
    In this episode of Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Cindy Valdez, an English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) specialist, and Founder & CEO of Teach To Learn, an international education exchange program. Cindy is passionate about inclusion, helping other educators develop leadership in EAL/D and cater for the academic and wellbeing needs of multilingual learners, including students from refugee backgrounds. She is an author of professional publications, served as President of the Association for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ATESOL) NSW and is Member of the Board of Directors of Primary English Teaching Association of Australia known as PETAA. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    41 mins
  • Australia‘s National Indigenous Languages Survey

    Australia‘s National Indigenous Languages Survey
    Oct 28 2025
    In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Zoe Avery, a Worimi woman and a Research Officer at the Centre for Australian Languages within the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Zoe and her teammates are preparing the upcoming 4th National Indigenous Languages Survey. This time around, the AIATSIS team have made some really important changes to the survey design through a co-design process which we will discuss. The survey will be conducted in late 2025 to 2026 and reported upon in 2026. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    42 mins
  • Arriving in a New Country

    Arriving in a New Country
    Sep 16 2025
    In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks writer, illustrator, filmmaker and Academy Award winner Shaun Tan. Shaun is best known for illustrated books that deal with social and historical subjects through dream-like imagery. His books have been widely translated throughout the world and enjoyed by readers of all ages. In the episode, Brynn and Shaun discuss his award-winning 2006 book The Arrival, which is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images. In the book, a man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope. For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see Life in a New Language, Discrimination by any other name: Language tests and racist immigration policy in Australia, Intercultural Communication – Now in the third edition, and Judging Refugees. If you liked this episode, be sure to say hello to Brynn and Language on the Move on Bluesky! For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 mins
  • Cold Rush

    Cold Rush
    Sep 9 2025
    In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Sari Pietikainen about her new book Cold Rush (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment - working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended. This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes. Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change. The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    28 mins
  • Sexual Imperialism and English Language Teaching

    Sexual Imperialism and English Language Teaching
    Sep 2 2025
    In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Vaughan Rapatahana about sexual predation in the English language teaching industry. The conversation addresses his new book Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024), which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation. Trigger warning: this show discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners may find distressing. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    32 mins
  • Intercultural Communication

    Intercultural Communication
    Aug 26 2025
    In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Loy Lising speaks with Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller about the 3rd edition of her best-selling textbook Intercultural Communication (Edinburgh UP, 2025). A comprehensive and critical overview of the field of intercultural communication Key concepts and discussions illuminated with international case studies of intercultural communication in real life Includes learning objectives, key points, exercises and suggestions for further reading in each chapter A new chapter devoted to intercultural crisis communication; expanded coverage of language in migration; and new studies and examples of virtual, online and computer-mediated communication throughout. Combining perspectives from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the third edition of this popular textbook provides students with an up-to-date overview of the field of intercultural communication. Ingrid Piller explains communication in context using two main approaches. The first treats cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. The second, informed by multilingualism studies, highlights the use and prestige of different languages and language varieties as well as the varying access that speakers have to them. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    51 mins
  • Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage

    Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage
    Aug 19 2025
    In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Dr Zozan Balci about Zozan’s new book, Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, Identity and Belonging in the Lives of Cultural In-betweeners, published in 2025 by Routledge.. The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their childhoods and lives today, exploring how visible racial differences from the mainstream, social power, emotions, and familial relationships continue to shape their use – or erasure – of their linguistic heritage. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    41 mins