A Snapshot of Academic Job Placements in Linguistics in the US and Canada

Abstract

Most people working in the field of linguistics in the US and Canada have an intuitive sense of who the "major players" are among PhD-granting linguistics departments. Our analysis demonstrates that the frequently-perceived hierarchy of linguistics programs is indeed correct. Drawing on publicly available information from Winter/Spring, 2019 on faculty at all PhD-granting linguistics programs across the US and Canada, we use social network and heat map visualizations to demonstrate the existence of an extraordinarily strong and relatively stable hierarchy of programs whose graduates dominate the linguistics academic job market. A secondary finding is that many of the top programs are characterized by gender imbalances. We argue that the top programs' tremendous influence on the job market as a whole affords these programs the ability - indeed, the responsibility - to take the lead in effecting positive change in the field's hiring patterns more broadly.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Publication Date

3-1-2024

Publication Title

Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique

Department

Anthropology

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2024.7

Keywords

Discipline of linguistics, Diversity, Academic job market, Market share, Academia

Language

English

Format

text

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