MESSAGE FROM LISE MENN: I’M A LINGUIST. WHY SHOULD I JOIN AAAS?

People join AAAS for lots of reasons, but here are some that have been important to me as a professor. If you are still a student, a lot of these are valid for you, too.

• I get to see what’s happening in other sciences, related and unrelated. It’s too easy to get isolated if you just read linguistics articles.

• I get to see what my colleagues in other fields are reading about linguistics. (Most of the senior people in the natural sciences at my university belong to AAAS.) Helps to have something to talk about when you find an astrophysicist sharing a table or an elevator with you.

• I get great stuff – with pictures – to put up on the department bulletin boards or e-mail to people who are interested, especially in areas of linguistics related to anthropology (human origins, origins of writing systems, deep language pre-history), cognitive science, and neuroscience.

• Lots of major research articles have a short associated ‘grabber’ in the THIS WEEK IN SCIENCE section, good for posting on my door, and an accessible associated ‘review’ that even the undergraduates can read, as well as the research article itself.

AAAS is organized into about 25 interest sections, and you can join up to three of them; many people who are active in the Linguistics and Language Sciences section are also active in Psychology, Anthropology, or Neurosciences. Each section has a business meeting at the annual mid-February AAAS meeting. For the dates of upcoming meetings please visit the home page on this site.

Our section is the smallest, reducing its impact on the organization – but if we can boost its membership, passive or active, we can make a difference!

What sort of difference? If you get active in AAAS, you can influence what the public – including but NOT limited to colleagues in other sciences – get to know about language and related sciences. You can organize a symposium on creole formation, on language death, on sign language, on language policies, on communication devices for people with language disorders, on emerging literacies; things that will appeal to ‘real people’ – including the press, which is what counts – if they are presented with an eye to their human impact. To find out how, contact any member of the Section Z steering committee.