Projects

“Perceiving Voice and Speaker” (2021-2025) is a project funded by the Young Researcher Talents Programme from The Research Council of Norway based at the Department of Law, Philosophy and International Studies at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences (Campus Lillehammer). The project started in December 2021. 

Project summary: The project investigates philosophical issues concerning voice perception and its role in linguistic communication. Voice often conveys rich information not only about a speaker’s emotional states and attitudes, but also about their identity, including information about their age or background. The importance of such information in everyday social interactions that take place in multilingual and multicultural societies is hard to overestimate. The goal of the project is to provide a systematic philosophical investigation of the role of voice and speaker impressions based on voice (and speech) perception in linguistic communication. The project has three central objectives: (1) to show that the auditory experience of a speaker’s voice is a fundamental element of spoken linguistic communication, (2) to investigate the nature and epistemic status of the impressions of speaker characteristics that arise when one’s experience of a speaker’s voice (and their manner of speaking) interacts with one’s expectations about the speaker, and (3) to investigate how some such impressions are systematically related to cases of implicit bias and discrimination against specific groups of speakers and explore the moral and societal implications of this phenomenon. 

Project members:

Principal Investigator: Anna Drożdżowicz

Postdoctoral researcher: Grace Paterson (from September 2022)

Participants in the national network:

Ingrid Lossius Falkum (University of Oslo)

Unn Røyneland (University of Oslo)

Guri Bordal Steien (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences)

Rachel Sterken (Hong Kong University, University of Oslo)

Participants in the project’s international network:

Berit Brogaard (University of Miami)

Sanford Goldberg (Northwestern University) 

Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck College, London)

Matthew Nudds (Warwick University)

Andy Peet (Leeds University)

Yael Peled (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)

Tamara Rakić (Lancaster University)

Barry Smith (Institute of Philosophy, UoL)

Deirdre Wilson (University College London)

Project-related events:

(03.11.2022) Kick off workshop with the project’s local network, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer. See here for details and programme. 

(upcoming) International workshop, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer. Date and details coming soon. 

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My previous project “Language, Meaning and Conscious Experience” (2018-2021, nr 275251) was funded by the Mobility Grant Fellowship Programme (FRICON) from The Research Council of Norway (and co-funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions). I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas (IFIKK), University of Oslo. Between 2018-2020 I was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Philosophy (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and Department of Philosophy (Birkbeck College, London).

The project was devoted to selected philosophical issues concerning the phenomenology and epistemology of linguistic understanding, with a focus on the nature, epistemology, and action-guiding roles of experiences of understanding linguistic utterances in a familiar language. 

Project-related events:

(upcoming) Workshop ‘Linguistic Understanding’, to be organised with Kim Pedersen Phillips at the University of Oslo (original date 13-14-08.20., currently postponed due to the Covid-19 travel restrictions).

(23.08. 2021) Closing workshop for for the project ‘Language, Meaning and Conscious Experience’, with the project’s local network, University of Oslo.

(07.05. 2021) Online read-ahead seminar on linguistic understanding, organised with Kim Pedersen Phillips at the University of Oslo.

(14-15.10. 2019) Workshop ‘Refined Audition: Music and Speech’, organised by Solveig Aasen, Keith Wilson (Perceiving Representations) and me at the University of Oslo.