On Wednesday, December 14, Applied Linguistics together with English Department at Umass Boston was thrilled to have Dr. Aileen O. Salonga present her work on English as an Affective Regime in Philippine Call Centers. After an engaging presentation on how English is taken up by Phillippine call center workers, doctoral students discussed perceptions of English status, language policies, ideologies, neoliberalism, and decolonization of knowledge in the Philippines with Dr. Salonga. Leading, of course, to more questions about conducting such research.
Dr. Salonga is a Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. She has a PhD in English Language Studies from the National University of Singapore and an MA in English from Virginia Tech.
She writes in the areas of language and work, language and gender, language and affect, and the politics of English/es. Her recent publications include “Empowerment narratives and sticky affects: the workings of affective capitalism in Philippine call centers” in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2022) and “Queering English language teaching: Insights from teachers in a Philippine state university” (co-authored with Veronico Tarrayo) in Critical Inquiry in Language Studies (2022).