The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is typically associated with violence, criminality, and aggression... more The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is typically associated with violence, criminality, and aggression, and these negative associations impact on the social meaning of Glaswegian Vernacular as used by working-class adolescent males. There have been, however, no studies which have made a systematic attempt to uncover the role fine-grained phonetic variation plays in indexing these associations. Moreover, there have been no studies of Glaswegian which have examined locally constituted groups of adolescent male speakers, and how such speakers use a range of linguistic and social practices in their construction of particular social identities.
This study is an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic account of Glaswegian Vernacular which examines the nexus of language, identity, and violence using data collected from a group of working-class adolescent males from a high school in the south side of the city between 2005 – 2008, and aims to uncover whether adolescent males who identified as ‘neds’ or who engaged in social practices considered ‘neddy’ have quantitative linguistic differences from those adolescent males who do not. Through the fine-grained phonetic analysis of the linguistic variables BIT, CAT and (TH), coupled with ethnographic observations, this thesis shows how an apparently homogenous group of speakers use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another.
In the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an establishe... more In the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an established part of language, gender, and sexuality research and grown in response to concerns about the limited criticality directed toward men and masculinities in sociolinguistics. In doing so, the field has added to the conceptual and theoretical tool kit of sociolinguistics, furthering both our understanding of the linguistic strategies used by men in a variety of contexts and the myriad links connecting language and the social performance of gender. This review surveys the historical trajectory of scholarship broadly concerned with men, masculinities, and language and charts its development from more critical work on men and masculinities within sociology to its emergence as an independent field of inquiry. I outline some of the key contributions this body of work has made to sociolinguistic theory, methodology, and knowledge and suggest some future research directions through which the field may engage with contemporary social issues.
This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining,... more This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.
Despite the great strides made over the past 30 years by female comedy performers, their status i... more Despite the great strides made over the past 30 years by female comedy performers, their status in a male-dominated industry has typically been marginal. This is coupled with the widespread view that even women who do appear on mainstream comedy face the challenge of getting their voices heard in an arena where it is often the loudest voice that wins. In order to investigate claims that female comedians contribute less than male comedians on comedy panel shows, this article presents the findings of a sociolinguistic analysis of the British show Mock the Week, drawing on an XML-annotated corpus of the transcripts of series five. Rather than viewing features such as talkativeness and interruption solely as a substantiation of conversational dominance (cf. Brand, 2009), we suggest that these can also be understood as strategies in the production of humour in the context of comedy panel shows. In addition to genre-specific considerations, our results show that the use of these features on Mock the Week is influenced by an interplay of social factors, rather than gender alone. Overall, this study could act as a catalyst for writers and production companies to use more linguistically-informed approaches to comedy show scripting, particularly in relation to issues of linguistic and representational inequality.
As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised so... more As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised sociolinguists by its rapid spread in the urban heartlands of Scotland. While attempts have been made to understand and model the influence of lexical effects, media effects and frequency effects, far less understood is the role of social identity. Using data collected as part of an ethnographic study of a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, this article addresses this gap in the literature by considering how variants of (!) are patterned across three distinct adolescent male Communities of Practice. Drawing on recent work on linguistic variation and social meaning (Eckert 2000), the article explores some of the social meanings of (θ), particularly those variants which previous research has reported as being associated with ‘toughness’.
Drawing on narrative data collected during a three-year ethnography of a Scottish high school, th... more Drawing on narrative data collected during a three-year ethnography of a Scottish high school, this article examines the construction of working-class adolescent masculinities. More specifically, the analysis focuses on how adolescent male speakers negotiate, reject and align themselves with the hegemonically dominant ideology of ‘tough’ masculinity, the role socially low-risk discourses of ‘tough’ masculinity play in interaction, and how speakers integrate a range of discursive strategies which help maintain homosociality when ‘tough’ masculinity is at stake. I argue that discourses which appear to be about ‘being tough’ do a great deal more social work than might be expected.
This article presents the results of an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic investigation o... more This article presents the results of an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic investigation of Glaswegian Vernacular and examines the intersection between language and identity using data collected from a group of working-class adolescent males, over the course of three years, from a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, called Banister Academy. Through the fine-grained acoustic analysis of the phonetic variable CAT (equivalent to the TRAP/BATH/PALM set, Johnston 1997), coupled with ethnographic observations, this article shows how patterns of variation are related to Community of Practice membership, how the members of the Communities of Practice in Banister Academy use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another, and how certain patterns of variation acquire social meaning within the peer-group. This article contributes to the under-researched area of adolescent male language use and offers one of the first ethnographically supported accounts of linguistic variation in Glasgow.
The purpose of this book is to show how research across sociolinguistics can achieve something ca... more The purpose of this book is to show how research across sociolinguistics can achieve something called 'impact,' and to provide a window into the journey that any researcher takes in pursuing this ascendant priority.
Early work in the field of sociophonetics and sexuality attempted to show how the speech of gay m... more Early work in the field of sociophonetics and sexuality attempted to show how the speech of gay men and women was quantitatively different to the speech of straight men and women. This approach was based on the idea that social constructs such as class and age also influenced patterns of linguistic variation. Since the early 90s, researchers have moved away from a deterministic view of language use and have adopted a more social constructionist approach to sexuality. Recent research has also considered how speakers manipulate their speech in the construction of their social identity to the relationship between perception of a speaker’s sexual orientation through speech. This entry outlines some of the major developments in the study of sexuality and phonetic variation.
The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is typically associated with violence, criminality, and aggression... more The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is typically associated with violence, criminality, and aggression, and these negative associations impact on the social meaning of Glaswegian Vernacular as used by working-class adolescent males. There have been, however, no studies which have made a systematic attempt to uncover the role fine-grained phonetic variation plays in indexing these associations. Moreover, there have been no studies of Glaswegian which have examined locally constituted groups of adolescent male speakers, and how such speakers use a range of linguistic and social practices in their construction of particular social identities.
This study is an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic account of Glaswegian Vernacular which examines the nexus of language, identity, and violence using data collected from a group of working-class adolescent males from a high school in the south side of the city between 2005 – 2008, and aims to uncover whether adolescent males who identified as ‘neds’ or who engaged in social practices considered ‘neddy’ have quantitative linguistic differences from those adolescent males who do not. Through the fine-grained phonetic analysis of the linguistic variables BIT, CAT and (TH), coupled with ethnographic observations, this thesis shows how an apparently homogenous group of speakers use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another.
In the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an establishe... more In the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an established part of language, gender, and sexuality research and grown in response to concerns about the limited criticality directed toward men and masculinities in sociolinguistics. In doing so, the field has added to the conceptual and theoretical tool kit of sociolinguistics, furthering both our understanding of the linguistic strategies used by men in a variety of contexts and the myriad links connecting language and the social performance of gender. This review surveys the historical trajectory of scholarship broadly concerned with men, masculinities, and language and charts its development from more critical work on men and masculinities within sociology to its emergence as an independent field of inquiry. I outline some of the key contributions this body of work has made to sociolinguistic theory, methodology, and knowledge and suggest some future research directions through which the field may engage with contemporary social issues.
This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining,... more This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.
Despite the great strides made over the past 30 years by female comedy performers, their status i... more Despite the great strides made over the past 30 years by female comedy performers, their status in a male-dominated industry has typically been marginal. This is coupled with the widespread view that even women who do appear on mainstream comedy face the challenge of getting their voices heard in an arena where it is often the loudest voice that wins. In order to investigate claims that female comedians contribute less than male comedians on comedy panel shows, this article presents the findings of a sociolinguistic analysis of the British show Mock the Week, drawing on an XML-annotated corpus of the transcripts of series five. Rather than viewing features such as talkativeness and interruption solely as a substantiation of conversational dominance (cf. Brand, 2009), we suggest that these can also be understood as strategies in the production of humour in the context of comedy panel shows. In addition to genre-specific considerations, our results show that the use of these features on Mock the Week is influenced by an interplay of social factors, rather than gender alone. Overall, this study could act as a catalyst for writers and production companies to use more linguistically-informed approaches to comedy show scripting, particularly in relation to issues of linguistic and representational inequality.
As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised so... more As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised sociolinguists by its rapid spread in the urban heartlands of Scotland. While attempts have been made to understand and model the influence of lexical effects, media effects and frequency effects, far less understood is the role of social identity. Using data collected as part of an ethnographic study of a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, this article addresses this gap in the literature by considering how variants of (!) are patterned across three distinct adolescent male Communities of Practice. Drawing on recent work on linguistic variation and social meaning (Eckert 2000), the article explores some of the social meanings of (θ), particularly those variants which previous research has reported as being associated with ‘toughness’.
Drawing on narrative data collected during a three-year ethnography of a Scottish high school, th... more Drawing on narrative data collected during a three-year ethnography of a Scottish high school, this article examines the construction of working-class adolescent masculinities. More specifically, the analysis focuses on how adolescent male speakers negotiate, reject and align themselves with the hegemonically dominant ideology of ‘tough’ masculinity, the role socially low-risk discourses of ‘tough’ masculinity play in interaction, and how speakers integrate a range of discursive strategies which help maintain homosociality when ‘tough’ masculinity is at stake. I argue that discourses which appear to be about ‘being tough’ do a great deal more social work than might be expected.
This article presents the results of an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic investigation o... more This article presents the results of an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic investigation of Glaswegian Vernacular and examines the intersection between language and identity using data collected from a group of working-class adolescent males, over the course of three years, from a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, called Banister Academy. Through the fine-grained acoustic analysis of the phonetic variable CAT (equivalent to the TRAP/BATH/PALM set, Johnston 1997), coupled with ethnographic observations, this article shows how patterns of variation are related to Community of Practice membership, how the members of the Communities of Practice in Banister Academy use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another, and how certain patterns of variation acquire social meaning within the peer-group. This article contributes to the under-researched area of adolescent male language use and offers one of the first ethnographically supported accounts of linguistic variation in Glasgow.
The purpose of this book is to show how research across sociolinguistics can achieve something ca... more The purpose of this book is to show how research across sociolinguistics can achieve something called 'impact,' and to provide a window into the journey that any researcher takes in pursuing this ascendant priority.
Early work in the field of sociophonetics and sexuality attempted to show how the speech of gay m... more Early work in the field of sociophonetics and sexuality attempted to show how the speech of gay men and women was quantitatively different to the speech of straight men and women. This approach was based on the idea that social constructs such as class and age also influenced patterns of linguistic variation. Since the early 90s, researchers have moved away from a deterministic view of language use and have adopted a more social constructionist approach to sexuality. Recent research has also considered how speakers manipulate their speech in the construction of their social identity to the relationship between perception of a speaker’s sexual orientation through speech. This entry outlines some of the major developments in the study of sexuality and phonetic variation.
With our contribution we intend to kick start a new area of debate in contemporary sociolinguisti... more With our contribution we intend to kick start a new area of debate in contemporary sociolinguistics. Our discipline has within it a strong tradition of engaging with ‘real world’ contexts, and doing good for people. But this impressive record has long been under-sung amid greater attention to theory, methodology, data, and other trappings of scholarly concern. Those things are important but the good we do is inconsistently celebrated.
We set out our plans for a new journal titled ‘Impacts in Language Research’, along with associated conference and colloquium plans. Our mission is to drive forward a new genre in writing and public speaking in sociolinguistics, maintaining a basis in empirical findings and rigorous methods but focusing on our contribution to society.
Our talk begins with a celebratory history of the good work done by sociolinguists over the decades, and proceeds to set out a manifesto for building up this area of dialogue in future.
In this talk, we intend to kick start a new area of debate in contemporary linguistics and langua... more In this talk, we intend to kick start a new area of debate in contemporary linguistics and language research.
The field of linguistics has a strong tradition of engaging with ‘real world’ contexts, and doing good for people. But this impressive record has long been under-sung amid greater attention to theory, methodology, data, and other trappings of scholarly concern. Those things are important of course, but the good we do in the world is inconsistently celebrated.
Our talk begins with a celebratory history of the good work done by linguists over the decades. We try to bring together the applications of linguistic research in raising human wellbeing in different contexts, showing how strong we are as a discipline in this regard.
We then proceed to set out a manifesto for building up this area of dialogue in future. We set out our plans for a new journal titled ‘Impacts in Language Research’, along with plans for associated conference and colloquium activities. Our mission is to drive forward a new genre in writing and public speaking in linguistics, maintaining a basis in empirical findings and rigorous methods but focusing on our contribution to society.
n 2014, self-proclaimed ‘pick-up artist’ (PUA hereafter) Julien Blanc was denied entry to the UK ... more n 2014, self-proclaimed ‘pick-up artist’ (PUA hereafter) Julien Blanc was denied entry to the UK following a campaign against his promotion of sexual violence and assault against women (Travis 2014). This intervention was one of the first occasions where the strategies of the PUA community shifted away from the confines of private online settings and into the media limelight.
Although PUA communities generally position themselves as ‘self-help’ fora for men to discuss methods of attracting sexual partners, the linguistic strategies used in these communities, including how women are represented, discussed and positioned, remain relatively underexplored in language, gender and sexualities research (although see Jones and Merrison 2012; Dayter and Rüdiger 2016).
In this paper, preliminary results of a corpus-based study of the online PUA community ‘The Red Pill’, a Reddit board (‘subreddit’) with ~200,000 subscribers are presented. The corpus was constructed by extracting comments and submission text from the 100 top submissions, totaling ~2m words. The focus is primarily on dominant (i.e. frequent) forms of social actor representation and practices that are part of the construction of online masculine identities. This work contributes to current debates concerning contemporary constructions of masculinities in online spaces (cf. Hardaker and McGlashan 2015), and highlights potential research directions in terms of ‘alt-right’ masculine identities.
This chapter deals with approaches to identity construction on a societal and individual level. I... more This chapter deals with approaches to identity construction on a societal and individual level. In (eds) Seargeant, P., A. Hewings and S. Pihlaja, 2018. The Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies. London: Routledge.
Goal: In August 2018, Greta Thunberg sat alone outside the Swedish Parliament with a handwritten ... more Goal: In August 2018, Greta Thunberg sat alone outside the Swedish Parliament with a handwritten sign that read skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for climate) to demand urgent climate action from world leaders. In just one year, this 16-year old climate activist has inspired the international demonstrations Fridays for Future and global climate strikes joined by millions of people all around the world. She has given speeches in front of politicians, world leaders and the UN Climate Action Summit and has gained the admiration of leading scientists from Dr Jane Goodall to Sir David Attenborough. Her success has also attracted waves of criticism and abuse, ranging from insults about her appearance and mental health to violent threats, mainly from the fossil fuel lobby, radical right politicians, journalists and climate change deniers. In this project, we conduct a multi-disciplinary analysis of Twitter data to investigate the links between climate denialism, misogyny and eco-fascist/far-right discourses, with a particular focus on discourses surrounding Greta Thunberg. We are especially interested in the implications of this research for positive discourse analysis: in order to understand how social change happens we will consider how, as an example of "helpful accounts of inspiring initiatives" (Martin, 2004), Greta Thunberg has been able to mobilise masses of protesters around the world and inspire a global climate activist movement.
References
Martin, J. R. (2004). Positive discourse analysis: Solidarity and change. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 49(1), 179-202.
Aims of project
• Using corpus linguistic methodologies, Robert Lawson’s principal aim in this project is to better understand the salient discursive strategies used on Twitter about Greta Thunberg, including hashtags, collocations and keywords, and how such methods can help inform subsequent analytical foci to hone in on specific moments of ideological positioning. • Drawing on the analytical tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics as well as Legitimation Code Theory, Eszter Szenes’ aim is to analyse the linguistic construction of values, attitudes and emotions to reveal Twitter users’ alignment into particular sub-cultures and their affiliation with or resistance against Greta Thunberg and the broader climate action movement inspired by her. • In this project, Gavin Lamb applies nexus analysis to examine the far-right environmental discourses that Twitter users circulate through negative tweets about Greta Thunberg in order to build oppositional ecopolitical identities and communities.
Research Team
Dr Robert Lawson (School of English, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK) draws on multi-disciplinary approaches, including sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, narrative analysis, and critical discourse analysis, to investigate linguistic practice in online spaces, particularly on Twitter, Reddit and community forums. He is interested in how language use is connected to broader notions of gender and identity, how resistance and alignment are strategically constructed, and how online spaces become sites of political and social contestation.
Dr Eszter Szenes (Peace & War Centre, Norwich University, VT USA/Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Vienna, Austria from 03/2020) is interested in identifying radicalisation strategies in online far-right propaganda, in order to gain a deep understanding of its linguistic repertoire and contribute to its prevention. She is particularly interested in examining how the radicalisation strategies of the European far-right deploy a wide range of nuanced semiotic, linguistic and visual meaning-making resources in order to recruit potential new members.
Dr Gavin Lamb's (Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, USA) main area of interest is the discursive practices mediating human relationships with animals and nature across offline and online spaces. He is particularly interested in developing nexus analysis to examine the digital practices people engage in to create social identities and communities in relation to environmental issues such as endangered species protection and climate activism.
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Thesis
This study is an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic account of Glaswegian Vernacular which examines the nexus of language, identity, and violence using data collected from a group of working-class adolescent males from a high school in the south side of the city between 2005 – 2008, and aims to uncover whether adolescent males who identified as ‘neds’ or who engaged in social practices considered ‘neddy’ have quantitative linguistic differences from those adolescent males who do not. Through the fine-grained phonetic analysis of the linguistic variables BIT, CAT and (TH), coupled with ethnographic observations, this thesis shows how an apparently homogenous group of speakers use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another.
Edited books
Journal articles
#manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms.
Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these
hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically,
our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions
about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect
their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable
dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become
sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.
Book chapters
Book Reviews
Conference presentations
This study is an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic account of Glaswegian Vernacular which examines the nexus of language, identity, and violence using data collected from a group of working-class adolescent males from a high school in the south side of the city between 2005 – 2008, and aims to uncover whether adolescent males who identified as ‘neds’ or who engaged in social practices considered ‘neddy’ have quantitative linguistic differences from those adolescent males who do not. Through the fine-grained phonetic analysis of the linguistic variables BIT, CAT and (TH), coupled with ethnographic observations, this thesis shows how an apparently homogenous group of speakers use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another.
#manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms.
Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these
hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically,
our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions
about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect
their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable
dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become
sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.
We set out our plans for a new journal titled ‘Impacts in Language Research’, along with associated conference and colloquium plans. Our mission is to drive forward a new genre in writing and public speaking in sociolinguistics, maintaining a basis in empirical findings and rigorous methods but focusing on our contribution to society.
Our talk begins with a celebratory history of the good work done by sociolinguists over the decades, and proceeds to set out a manifesto for building up this area of dialogue in future.
The field of linguistics has a strong tradition of engaging with ‘real world’ contexts, and doing good for people. But this impressive record has long been under-sung amid greater attention to theory, methodology, data, and other trappings of scholarly concern. Those things are important of course, but the good we do in the world is inconsistently celebrated.
Our talk begins with a celebratory history of the good work done by linguists over the decades. We try to bring together the applications of linguistic research in raising human wellbeing in different contexts, showing how strong we are as a discipline in this regard.
We then proceed to set out a manifesto for building up this area of dialogue in future. We set out our plans for a new journal titled ‘Impacts in Language Research’, along with plans for associated conference and colloquium activities. Our mission is to drive forward a new genre in writing and public speaking in linguistics, maintaining a basis in empirical findings and rigorous methods but focusing on our contribution to society.
Although PUA communities generally position themselves as ‘self-help’ fora for men to discuss methods of attracting sexual partners, the linguistic strategies used in these communities, including how women are represented, discussed and positioned, remain relatively underexplored in language, gender and sexualities research (although see Jones and Merrison 2012; Dayter and Rüdiger 2016).
In this paper, preliminary results of a corpus-based study of the online PUA community ‘The Red Pill’, a Reddit board (‘subreddit’) with ~200,000 subscribers are presented. The corpus was constructed by extracting comments and submission text from the 100 top submissions, totaling ~2m words. The focus is primarily on dominant (i.e. frequent) forms of social actor representation and practices that are part of the construction of online masculine identities. This work contributes to current debates concerning contemporary constructions of masculinities in online spaces (cf. Hardaker and McGlashan 2015), and highlights potential research directions in terms of ‘alt-right’ masculine identities.
Seargeant, Ann Hewings, Stephen Pihlaja
© 2018 – Routledge
References
Martin, J. R. (2004). Positive discourse analysis: Solidarity and change. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 49(1), 179-202.
Aims of project
• Using corpus linguistic methodologies, Robert Lawson’s principal aim in this project is to better understand the salient discursive strategies used on Twitter about Greta Thunberg, including hashtags, collocations and keywords, and how such methods can help inform subsequent analytical foci to hone in on specific moments of ideological positioning.
• Drawing on the analytical tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics as well as Legitimation Code Theory, Eszter Szenes’ aim is to analyse the linguistic construction of values, attitudes and emotions to reveal Twitter users’ alignment into particular sub-cultures and their affiliation with or resistance against Greta Thunberg and the broader climate action movement inspired by her.
• In this project, Gavin Lamb applies nexus analysis to examine the far-right environmental discourses that Twitter users circulate through negative tweets about Greta Thunberg in order to build oppositional ecopolitical identities and communities.
Research Team
Dr Robert Lawson (School of English, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK) draws on multi-disciplinary approaches, including sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, narrative analysis, and critical discourse analysis, to investigate linguistic practice in online spaces, particularly on Twitter, Reddit and community forums. He is interested in how language use is connected to broader notions of gender and identity, how resistance and alignment are strategically constructed, and how online spaces become sites of political and social contestation.
Dr Eszter Szenes (Peace & War Centre, Norwich University, VT USA/Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Vienna, Austria from 03/2020) is interested in identifying radicalisation strategies in online far-right propaganda, in order to gain a deep understanding of its linguistic repertoire and contribute to its prevention. She is particularly interested in examining how the radicalisation strategies of the European far-right deploy a wide range of nuanced semiotic, linguistic and visual meaning-making resources in order to recruit potential new members.
Dr Gavin Lamb's (Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, USA) main area of interest is the discursive practices mediating human relationships with animals and nature across offline and online spaces. He is particularly interested in developing nexus analysis to examine the digital practices people engage in to create social identities and communities in relation to environmental issues such as endangered species protection and climate activism.