New Episode on The Professoriate: In Conversation with Maria Arche

In this episode Olga talks to Maria about the social role of linguistics and what it means to be an activist in this field, moving from chemistry to languages, speaking up as a woman in academia and creating safe spaces for all of us. This episode is dedicated to Professor Linda Burke, who has been instrumental in both Maria and Olga's academic, professional (and personal) development.

Professor María J Arche is Professor in Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Research & Enterprise in Language (CREL). She obtained a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics & Language Acquisition under the supervision of Tim Stowell (University California Los Angeles) and Violeta Demonte (Autonomous University of Madrid). Based on her doctoral dissertation she published the monograph Individuals in Time: Tense, aspect and the individual/stage distinction, in the collection Linguistics Today, John Benjamins Publishing (Amsterdam/Philadelphia) in 2006.

She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southampton funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of California Los Angeles, Massachusetts Amherst, Groningen and Tromsø as well as part of several research projects. She is currently the Principal Investigator of an international team that has been awarded a theme-group fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Her research falls within the syntax-semantics interface focusing on Tense, Aspect, Argument Structure and copular verbs. She has studied these topics in the grammar of Spanish and has also investigated their crosslinguistic variation and acquisition.

Recent works include the edition of a Special Issue for the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory Arche, M.J. (ed.) 2014. Aspect across languages: semantic primitives, morpho-syntactic representation and the limits of cross-linguistic variation and Arche, M.J.,A. Fábregas and R. Marín (eds.) 2019. The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages, published by Oxford University Press in its collection of Theoretical Linguistics. These works comprise both extensive empirical data (from 17 and 12 languages respectively) and detailed theoretical analyses with consequences that go beyond the main topics of the works.

What is the Professoriate?

Professor Olga Martin-Ortega talks to women, and people who identify themselves as women, in academia about their lives and work; the choices and decisions they made to get where they are; the women who inspired them and how to empower women at earlier stages in their academic development. The Professoriate is the 'body of college and university teachers at an institution or in society'. In this podcast we focus on the voices of women, who have had less representation and whose experiences have been often neglected in senior academic bodies.

BHRE advices the European Parliament on Due Diligence

The Subcommittee on Human Rights (DROI) and the Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) jointly organised an online inter-parliamentary meeting with National Parliaments on 21 April 2022 on “Corporate Responsibility for serious human rights abuses in third countries”. The Committee on International trade (INTA) was also associated to this event. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the Commission's proposal for a directive on corporate sustainability due diligence that was adopted on 23 February 2022 and its implications for Corporate Responsibility for serious human rights abuses in third countries.

The meeting included the participation of Olga Martin-Ortega, Professor of International Law, University of Greenwich, UK and Claire Methven O´Brien, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, who presented their draft study for the European Parliament on the European Committee’s proposed Directive on mandatory corporate sustainability due diligence. We were pleased to have Martin-Ortega address the points of divergence on the differing document and with the aim of improving the document, address the limitations, including the absence of the recognition of indigenous communities and some environmental impacts.

In this respect, the European Parliament and its Subcommittee on Human Rights have been strongly committed to the development of EU specific and mandatory external policies to counter the negative effect of business practices on the enjoyment of human rights.

The video of the live could be accessed here.

Sustainable public procurement and the European Green Deal- New BHRE Brief

On 1 December 2021, Professor Olga Martin-Ortega appeared as an expret before the European Parliament in its Public Hearing on ‘Sustainable public procurement: using the full potential of public buying to achieve goals of the European Green Deal’.. The Hearing was organised by the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection in association with Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety and chaired by MEPs Anna Cavazzini (IMCO Chair) and Pascal Canfin (ENVI Chair). The video of the hearing, as well as the presentations of the speakers at the IMCO website. Dr. Marta Andhov, also a member of the SAPIENS Network, provided evidence in the same panel.

Following her intervention we have prepared a Policy Brief: Sustainable public procurement: Strengthening the social and human rights dimensions of SPP in the framework of the European Green Deal (BHRE Research Series. Policy Brief 1. December 2021). This Brief focuses on the link between sustainable public procurement and human rights in the context of the social and external dimensions of the Green Deal. It provides insights and recommendations to strengthen sustainable procurement’s role as a powerful tool for achieving the European Green Deal’s goals both in and outside the EU borders. Access the Brief here and in our Resources page.