DoctorKevin Watson

Organising a workshop: Mergers in English: Perspectives from phonology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. Held at the International Conference for the Linguistics of English, June 2011. I was co-organiser of this workshop. It represented a collaboration of colleagues from universities in the UK, USA and New Zealand. As a result of the workshop, we were invited to write a book chapter for the proceedings of the conference (due in 2013), and have also successfully proposed a special issue of the journal English Language and Linguistics, which will also appear in 2013.

Professional membership; International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (2010-present). This is the main international association for work on forensic phonetics. New members must be proposed by existing members who can vouch for their professional credentials.

Organising a conference: UK Language Variation and Change, Lancaster, 2007 (2007). I was co-organiser of the largest and most respected conference in the UK, held at Lancaster in 2007. Approximately 100 delegates attended the meeting.

Organising a workshop: Liverpool and Merseyside Regionalism: an interdisciplinary workshop, Lancaster, March 2007. I was the sole organiser for this workshop, which explored the senses of regionalism in the north-west of England. It brought together researchers from linguistics, media studies, geography, sociology and other disciplines, and established a mailing list for cross-disciplinary discussion, which is still on going.

Professional membership; British Association of Academic Phoneticians (2006-present). BAAP is the main association in Britain for work on phonetics. Existing members vote on the selection of new members.

I was co-organiser of the inaugural Northern English Workshop, held in Lancaster in 2006. The meeting was initiated because of the lack of a specific venue in which to examine the linguistics of English spoken in this region. About 50 people attended the event, and it was so successful that it has now turned into a conference series. The 5th meeting will take place in Nottingham in 2012.

I was an invited plenary speaker at a special session on 'Northern Englishes and (socio)linguistic theory' at the Northern English Workshop (NEW) held in March 2008 in Salford, UK. The talk was entitled: "Sociophonetics: more than the sum of its parts?". This was an early conference in the NEW series, which has now developed into an established forum for discussion of northern English dialects. The conference was attended by approximately 80 delegates from the UK and Europe.

Invited speaker; "Celebrating Scouse", University of Liverpool, March. I was an invited plenary speaker at this one day conference about the Liverpool accent. The event combined academic discussion with outreach activities, as it was open to members of the public. Approximately 120 delegates attended the event, which was later covered in The Times newspaper (see media coverage, in CRE)

Invited speaker; I was invited to give a talk at the 2011 Poznan Linguistics Meeting, which focused 'Experimental and Innovative methodologies in sociolinguistics'. The talk was presented jointly with Lynn Clark, and was entitled: 'Change Point Analysis and language attitudes: measuring reactions to regional variation in real time'.

I was invited to give a paper at a panel session at the Regions and Regionalism in and Beyond Europe conference, held at Lancaster University in 2007. The paper was given jointly with Paul Kerswill and was entitled “The invasion of the biggest pest since the cockroach, yes, the Scouser".