Abstract
This chapter focuses on ‘Global Challenges’ research, where we brought together multiple stakeholders in academia and a range of professions, including charities and NGOs, to investigate the challenges and opportunities for women in a wide range of professional settings. Our sociolinguistic analysis examines the interrelationship between language, gender and leadership in businesses and organisations in urban and rural settings, focusing on narrative and the socio-political power of storytelling. We analyse narratives from a unique dataset of women in East Africa from a variety of professions including market traders, farmers, teachers, social entrepreneurs and NGO leaders. We demonstrate how the narrative research findings have directly informed advocacy and activism, creating impact tools to inspire, mentor and create cohesion amongst geographically disparate groups. We highlight specific socio-cultural challenges, emergent from the narrative analysis, and document a range of examples of advocacy and activist work, informed by sociolinguistic narrative analysis.
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Lumala, M., Mullany, L. (2020). Language, Gender and Leadership: Applying the Sociolinguistics of Narrative and Identity in East Africa. In: Mullany, L. (eds) Professional Communication. Communicating in Professions and Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3_4
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