Accentism: Voice
as a Marker of Control
and Belonging
Accentism, in the context of this research, refers to discrimination based on how someone speaks. I use this term critically to expose how voice becomes a social filter. Certain accents are heard as credible. Others are heard as lacking. In creative education and industries, accentism is not incidental. It is central to how legitimacy is performed and read. A regional, non-standard, or nationality-marked accent can position a speaker as foreign to the space, even when their work belongs.
This is not just a linguistic judgment. It carries assumptions about intellect, professionalism, and cultural value. Naming it as accentism gives form to a discomfort I have known closely. The awareness that my voice might betray me. That the rhythm, tone, or inflection shaped by my Irish upbringing might register as informal, excessive, or unserious in institutions built around an anglicised idea of neutrality.
The effect is not only external. It is somatic. Over time, these experiences have contributed to what I now recognise as a disorder triggered by accentism, a physiological response to the social demand that my voice must change to be heard clearly. This is not metaphor. It is embodied exclusion. What begins as a glance, a correction, a raised eyebrow, enters the body as stress. It accumulates. It lives in the throat.
Symbolic Violence in Creative Education
The creative industries, and the educational systems that feed them, still operate within tightly policed codes of belonging. According to The Sutton Trust (2024), speakers from working-class or regional backgrounds remain starkly underrepresented, not only due to economic barriers but also through informal rules of language and conduct. These codes are rarely taught. They are expected. They are assumed.
In design school, I quickly learned what kind of voice was expected. What cadence was read as intelligent. What tone was read as creative. My habitus, shaped not only by geography but by early exposure to English xenophobia during the 1980s, often felt unwelcome in critique settings. When I speak in my natural accent, I become more visible, but not always legible. The voice is heard, but not always recognised. These small misalignments are not neutral. They shape confidence. They shape output. I found myself softening my accent during presentations, adjusting my phrasing to mirror what was received without resistance. These were not conscious strategies at first. They were adaptations. Efforts to smooth what might otherwise be dismissed. Bourdieu’s(1991) notion of symbolic violence helps explain how these structures work, not through open exclusion, but through the normalisation of certain ways of speaking, presenting, and being.
In this context, code-switching is not a linguistic tool. It is affective labour. It is work. To shift one’s voice in order to be perceived as credible is to perform a version of the self that feels safer, but also less honest.
Voice, Nationality, and Creative Power
My experience is shaped by nationality-based marginalisation within a UK-centric creative system. To be Irish in these spaces is to carry a complicated visibility. One that is often aestheticised, but rarely allowed to speak critically. The Irish accent is celebrated when attached to charisma or entertainment, but still met with resistance when attached to analysis, authority, or critique.
In classroom critique, I have watched the same point land differently depending on who voiced it. The accent changed the weight of the idea. A British-accented peer speaking with fluency and ease was rarely questioned. The same idea, offered in a different register, was heard as less secure. Or overly emotional. Or naive.
These dynamics do not live in formal policy. They live in tone. In repetition. In who gets asked to explain themselves, and who does not.
Refusing Neutrality
This journal, and the voice I write it in, is a refusal. A refusal to suppress the way I sound. A refusal to pretend that voice is neutral, that critique is detached, that language exists outside of power. I do not wish to sound correct. I want to sound present.
To critique symbolic violence with integrity, I must acknowledge how it lives in me. Not just in what I say, but in how I have learned to say it. This is a journal of reflexive disruption. A space to trace the ways I have been shaped, and the ways I am pushing back.
Speculative Design as a Tool for Change (Voices Of Creativity)
Voices of Creativity is a speculative design intervention, not in the sense of distant futures, but as a near-future provocation rooted in lived experience. It is a digital platform designed to surface the unspoken dynamics of accentism in the creative industries. Through interactive storytelling, reflection prompts, and the Bias Mirror exercise, the platform asks a central speculative question: What if the creative world truly listened to all voices?
The goal is not to present a solution, but to create friction. To interrupt the quiet normalisation of a single way of sounding professional. The Bias Mirror sits at the heart of this. It asks users to listen to creative pitches voiced in a range of accents, each carrying identical content, then reflect on their responses. This is not about exposing individual prejudice. It is about holding up a mirror to the internalised hierarchies that shape perception. When 77 percent of creatives report feeling pressure to change their accent at work (Creative Access & FleishmanHillard UK, 2023), the need for such reflection is clear. The Bias Mirror transforms that data into a felt encounter. It moves from abstraction into self-awareness. Alongside this, the platform houses a growing archive of capsule stories, audio, visual, and text-based accounts from creatives whose experiences of accent-based bias have shaped their careers and confidence. These stories come from across regions and disciplines, offering a patchwork of resistance and resilience. They invite solidarity without generalisation.
The design language of the platform is intentional. Lowercase typography. Clean, open visual space. The aesthetic does not flatten difference, it makes room for it. Every interaction is structured to foreground voice as a material of design, not a problem to be edited out.
Speculative design allows me to frame this work not as problem-solving, but as pattern-breaking. It asks what is already happening beneath the surface, and what that reveals about the future we are making by default. Voices of Creativity takes familiar mechanisms, onboarding, feedback, user input , and retools them to foreground discomfort. The speculative power lies not in the surreal, but in the almost-real. The idea that we are not far from issuing students a real Bias Mirror is what gives the intervention its charge.This methodology is not without tension. Speculative work in social contexts can slip into saviour narratives or external critique. I try to hold the opposite stance. I am inside the problem I am designing for. The discomfort I trace is mine too. I know the pause before speaking in critique. I know the urge to smooth my voice in a pitch. The platform is an attempt to hold those moments in shared space.
Speculation also opens a path beyond critique. Future iterations of the platform could include geographical maps, AI-based voice accessibility tools, or peer feedback systems that normalise tonal variation. But these features are not tech-forward gimmicks. They are structural responses. Small moves toward rethinking how creative education defines participation.
The Bias Mirror is only one entry point. It is a provocation, not a product. Its value lies in the conversations it opens, the quiet realisations it triggers. In workshops and early feedback, participants describe moments of unexpected reflection. A shift in how they hear themselves. A recognition that they, too, have been edited, or have edited others.
This is where design meets pedagogy. Voices of Creativity does not end at the interface. It extends into critique spaces, into syllabi, into hiring conversations. It is a speculative seed, but one with roots.
For me, this work is not a detour from design. It is design. It is a refusal to separate politics from aesthetics, or pedagogy from feeling. Through the Bias Mirror, I design not only with form, but
with friction.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Creative Access & FleishmanHillard UK. (2023). The language of discrimination: Class barriers and accent bias in the creative industries. Creative Access.
Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Sutton Trust. (2024). A class act? Social mobility and the creative industries. London: The Sutton Trust.
Todd, A. R., Bodenhausen, G. V., Richeson, J. A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2011). Perspective taking combats automatic expressions of racial bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(6), 1027–1042.
Galinsky, A. D., & Moskowitz, G. B. (2000). Perspective-taking: Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 708–724.
Zoya, Z. (2025). Giving everyone a voice in a Gen AI age. Creative Review.
