‘Friendnography’ and the ethical questions it raises
Of all the hundreds of photos on my old phone, there was only one that I absolutely had to get […]
Cassie Smith-Christmas
Cassie is a sociolinguist whose work centres primarily on Family Language Policy (FLP), child agency, new speakers, and ethnographic approaches to language policy. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow and has conducted work with families in Scotland and Ireland through fellowships with Marie Skłodwoska-Curie Actions, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Irish Research Council, and Soillse. Cassie also held a fellowship at Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where she documented her eight-year ethnography of a Scottish Gaelic-speaking family on the Isle of Skye, Scotland in her monograph Family Language Policy: Maintaining an Endangered Language in the Home (Palgrave, 2016). Co-edited volumes include New Speakers of Minority Languages: Linguistic Ideologies and Practices (Palgrave, 2018) and Gaelic in Contemporary Scotland: The Revitalisation of an Endangered Language (EUP, 2018). Cassie also writes creatively and her unpublished novel The Huguenot’s Chest was a winner in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and the Blue Pencil Agency’s Pitch Prize. Other poetry and prose has appeared in Ireland, the UK, and US, including Southword, Crannóg, Gutter, The Wild Word, and Frazzled Lit. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Forward Prize for Poetry, and shortlisted in The Best of Rural Writing 2023.