PhD student gives paper at major international linguistics conference

PhD student Maria Fotiadou has recently given a paper at the 9th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (Birmingham University). Her paper explored the issue of competitiveness in the ‘graduate job market’ and the notion of ‘employability’, as presented by Universities in the UK through their career services webpages. It is part of a wider project that seeks to understand the role of careers services inside academia. With a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis methods and Corpus Linguistics tools, the analysis focuses on identifying, interpreting, explaining and evaluating (Baker and McEnery, 2015, pp. 2-3) the ‘reality’ presented by these services as students are expected to ‘invest’ their time at university in getting prepared for the transition from HE to the workplace.

'How the hell did this get on tv?'

Professor Angela Smith has given a paper at the Ross Priory Broadcast Talk Seminar. The topic of her paper was nakedness in dating shows; in particular Channel 4’s Naked Attraction. This is a show that opens with the assertion that ‘Online dating has been a complete nightmare […] with the status symbols we wear getting in the way of finding our perfect mate.’  With full nudity, lingering close-ups and graphic descriptions, many viewers took to Twitter to express dismay that the show had made it to mainstream television, and led to the Guardian referring to it as symptomatic of the dystopian media landscape of 2016. Angela's paper will explore how the shock of graphic nudity is ameliorated by the linguistic strategies of positive politeness that all participants seem to collude with. Such amelioration would appear to be a defence against accusations of voyeuristic and pornographic content on mainstream television.

Great Writing Conference 2017

Dr Sarah Dobbs will be giving a paper at the 'Great Writing Conference 2017', to be held at Imperial College, London. She will be exploring three key areas within the filmic representation of Arrival (2016). One, how does the film's fictive space encourage the consideration of the viewers' own motivations in concrete, everyday reality? Two, how do some of the film’s key conceits (such as translating a language and the idea that language may construct identity; the decision to have a child with the knowledge that they will die from a terminal illness) invite our questions about our own perspectives and choices in various aspects of our lives? Finally, if we allow this supposition to stand, how can we be aware of the implications of the constructions of our own fictional narratives and the real-world consequences of these?