About the Project
Centre Co-director Jules Holroyd (University of Sheffield, they/them), with affiliate member Matthew Cull (Trinity College Dublin, they/them) and Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton, she/her) have a funded knowledge exchange project on inclusive language in perinatal care. The recent work we have been doing has set out a ‘toolbox’ approach to inclusive language. This work uses applied philosophy of language to show how to do inclusive language well, and responds to prominent critiques of inclusive language, arguing that some of the most common objections to inclusive language can be met by adopting a pluralistic linguistic approach.
Those sympathetic to inclusive language tend to promote ‘monistic’ approaches – such as gender neutral or gender additive language. But these approaches are sometimes inadequate, which can fuel objections to inclusive language. Rather, our pluralistic approach fares better by combining these approaches along with other linguistic devices in order to be sensitive to the moral and communicative goals of a context. This requires careful piecemeal reform of public-facing communications, to ensure that meaning and accuracy is preserved whilst messages also have appropriate reach and avoid exclusion and marginalisation.
As of 2025, we have developed our work to focus also on infant feeding and parental leave schemes. We are running a series of workshops on this range of topics in 2025-2026 – see here for details and how to register.
Resources:
- New!! Watch our short video presenting our approach! Produced in collaboration with Sort Of… films.
- You can read about our approach in this piece for The Conversation.
- This piece has been translated into Chinese for Queer Margins magazine.
- You can see a snapshot of our work in the conference poster below.
- A longer paper was published online first in January 2025 in the journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia.
- This pamphlet provides an accessible guide to our approach. We have hard copies if you would like some to share with members of your organisation. Please get in touch and we can post some out!
Events
The funded project will ran from November 2023-July 2025. From 2025-2026 we continue to run a new suite of workshops to bring together a range of care providers and policy makers to discuss how to advance inclusive language and practice in their work.
If you’d like to find out more, read our paper on the topic, or participate in one of our project workshops, please contact us or register at the link above!
PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS OF THE UPCOMING PROGRAM OF EVENTS, AND TO REGISTER FOR OUR NEXT ONLINE WORKSHOP, OR GO DIRECTLY TO REGISTRATION FORM.
- This work has been presented to
- the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative conference in Harrogate, in November 2023.
- the Maternal, Parental and Infant Nutrition and Nurture Conference in April 2025.
- the Workshop on Gender and Philosophy 25th Anniversary conference, June 2025.
- the British Academy conference on the Ethics of Health Communication, in June 2025.
To register for upcoming events, or see details of past events, click here
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