Nikki Lane
Nikki Lane is Assistant Professor in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. An interdisciplinary scholar trained as a Cultural and Linguistic Anthropologist, her work broadly explores issues related to American Popular Culture, African American language practices, and sexual cultures in the United States. Emphasizing analyses of race, gender, sexuality, and class, her work examines contemporary Black queer life and language. She is the author of The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability which explores the use of the word “ratchet” in a community of Black queer women in Washington, DC.
Kevin Guyan
Kevin Guyan (he/him) is a writer and researcher whose work explores the intersection of data and identity. He is the author of Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion and Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action. He is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Gender + Sexuality Data Lab.
Erez Levon
Erez Levon (he/him) is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Society at the University of Bern. His work uses quantitative, qualitative, and experimental methods to examine how people produce and perceive socially meaningful patterns of variation in language. He is particularly interested in how variation signals group membership and in the relationship between language and broader structures of social inequality. He examines these issues primarily as they relate to gender, sexuality, social class and national belonging, and he has conducted field research on these topics in Israel/Palestine, South Africa, the US, & the UK.
Stamatina Katsiveli
Stamatina Katsiveli (she/her) is a sociolinguist and group-analytic psychotherapist, who works as an Assistant Professor at The American College of Greece. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from Queen Mary University of London. Her work examines language, gender/sexuality and belonging, as well as the dynamics of groups across educational, organizational and therapeutic settings, bringing group analysis into dialogue with sociolinguistics. Her research has appeared in Gender & Language, Journal of Pragmatics, and Anglistica AION. She has also served as a reviewer for Gender & Language and the Journal of Language and Discrimination.
Eddie Ungless
Eddie Ungless (he/him, they/them) recently completed their PhD at the Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Björn Ross, Vaishak Belle and Zachary Horne. His work addresses the felt harms of NLP technologies, motivated by a desire to effectively mitigate harm by more deeply understanding the experiences of those impacted by these technologies. He has contributed to the study of queerphobia in NLP, for example with papers addressing the potential harms of image- and text-generation models to the trans and nonbinary community. They have previously spoken on AI and gender at the Scottish AI Summit, and with journalists from Nature and TransLash.