2024-2025 Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI)
Sub-Committee

Ying Xiong is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. She holds a BA in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in South China and an MPhil in Second Language Education from Cambridge University in the UK. Ying has taught linguistically diverse students at K-12 and undergraduate and graduate levels. Informed by her transnational life trajectories across different social and educational contexts and her identity as an international graduate student parent, her research focuses on the English language academic socialization of multilingual mother scholars, translingual practices, and intersectional identities. Ying joined the JEDI Subcommittee to advocate for family-friendly AAAL conferences and create a more inclusive and equitable conference experience for parent scholars with childcare responsibilities. Ying can be reached at yjx5168@psu.edu. 

​Yetunde S. Alabede is a daughter, wife, mother, friend, liberal Muslim, cultural enthusiast, and food lover. She is currently a Ph. D student in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education (CITE) program at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. She received the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Program fellowship (2018-2019) and the P.E.O International Peace Scholarship for two consecutive years (2022-2024). She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Education from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and a master’s in Cross-Cultural and International Education from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Her research includes a decolonial and Global South epistemologies approach to language policies and practices of African and African (im)migrant families; the nexus between parenting, languaging, and gifting; multilingualism, Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) pedagogy, and home-school-community educational collaboration to enhance African and African (im)migrant children’s development and sense of belonging. She joined the AAAL’s JEDI sub-committee to assist in developing strategies to support student-parents and ensuring more involvement of graduate students from Africa and the diaspora. Yetunde can be reached at alabedey@msu.edu. 

​Malachi Henry, M.A., CCC-SLP, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Malachi holds a B.S. and M.A. in speech-language pathology from Ball State University. He is a fully licensed clinician certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and he has worked in early intervention, preschool, and elementary school settings addressing developmental speech and language disorders. His primary research interests center around acoustics of disordered speech, sociophonetics, and speech perception in response to variation in the signal due to talker characteristics such as race, gender, accent, and impairment. He is a member of his department's DEIJ Recruitment and Retention Subcommittee and he has joined the JEDI subcommittee to bring perspectives from communication sciences and disorders and to continue to engage in DEIJ efforts in the scientific organizations to which he belongs. Malachi can be reached at mahhenry@iu.edu, and you can find out more about what he has been up to recently by visiting https://www.malachi-henry.com/. 

Lizzy Hanks is a PhD candidate in applied linguistics at Northern Arizona University. She holds an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Northeastern Illinois University and a BA in Linguistics from Brigham Young University. She has taught English in Thailand, Austria, China, and the US. Her research centers on the application of corpus methods to pragmatics, lexis, and register, with a focus on conversational language. She is currently compiling the Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English (LANA-CASE) alongside an international team of linguists. Lizzy is passionate about open science and hopes to improve accessibility to scholarship and academic resources on a global scale. She can be reached at eah472@nau.edu, and you can find out more about what she has been up to by visiting https://hankselizabeth.wordpress.com/.