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Discourse and Sustainability

Beschreibung

The Seminar Series "Discourse and Sustainability" is an international forum for presenting and discussing new, cutting edge, research on discourse and issues of sustainability, environment, climate change and ecology.

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Our next seminar takes place on 19th April 2024, 12 noon UK TIME. Robert Poole (University of Alabama) will talk about Investigating ecological change and climate crisis through diachronic corpus-assisted ecolinguistics

Please register here for the next webinar in our series: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/790191bd-c41d-4504-92b9-8ca799b8971f@490a8197-7b83-4f10-89b9-83189be3835e

ABSTRACT:

In this presentation, I investigate how social data captured in large corpora can complement existing scientific evidence of climate change and serve as indicators of our worsening ecological crisis. Indeed, there is ample scientific data for our present ecological crisis, but we have largely left unexplored the social data present in large collections of language and how this data may also reflect the climate crisis and demonstrate our changing understandings of and relationships with the physical world. While it is broadly accepted that social and technological changes are reflected in language change, much less explored is the relationship between language change and ecological change. 

Thus, in this presentation, I present findings on the shifting representations of the ecology-relevant words wilderness and hurricane/s in order to investigate the shifting perceptions, understandings, and relationships with these entities and events.  The approach integrates the techniques of discourse-oriented corpus studies with the framework of ecolinguistics, as it implements a data-driven approach for investigating the role of language on “the life-sustaining interactions of humans, other species and the physical environment” (ecolinguistics-association.org).

In the presentation, I will briefly present case studies of two eco-keywords: wilderness and hurricane/s. For the former, I explore shifting collocational patterns with wilderness across the approximately two-hundred years of language use captured in the Corpus of Historical American English. For the latter, a diachronic collocation analysis of adjectives co-occurring with hurricane/s across the six five-year periods in the Corpus of Contemporary American English from 1990-2019 was conducted. In the analyses, collocation data were collected and the Kendall’s Tau correlation coefficient for each collocate was calculated in order to assess the strength of diachronic change. For wilderness, the data demonstrates that framings of grandeur and vitality have declined while framings reflecting poor health have increased. For hurricane/s, the data indicate that adjectives indicating larger size, greater severity, and increased strength are more frequently co-occurring with the node terms across the last three decades. [Please note that other data from my ongoing research may be presented in addition to/in place of these items.]

The presentation asserts the affordances of diachronic analysis for revealing changing perceptions and understandings of the physical world and climate change-related events.  Finally, the presentation forwards a case for continued diachronic corpus studies in ecolinguistics to complement existing physical science data of climate change, to demonstrate how language use reflects beliefs and practices that contribute to the climate crisis, but also to explore how emergent language patterns align more positively with ecological wellbeing, justice, and sustainability.

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Programme Summer Term 2024

9th February 2024, 11 am UK time (note the different time): Rescheduled talk, Ben Clarke (University of Gothenburg) Wanting for a better climate of discussion on the environment: Patterns of impoliteness, transitivity and Engagement in online newsreader comments that receive uncivil replies - catch up here: https://youtu.be/4oAxX0OCdco

16th February 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Jonathan Joseph (University of Bristol): Resilience, sustainability and the crisis of the Liberal International Order - catch up here: https://youtu.be/0NQniwwGZR4

15th March 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Kelsey Campolong (Ulster University): Neoliberalism in the Glasgow Climate Pact: Interdiscursivity and Faux-Sustainability at COP26  - catch up here: https://youtu.be/4DJsghVbWBk

19th April 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Robert Poole (University of Alabama): Investigating ecological change and climate crisis through diachronic corpus-assisted ecolinguistics

17th May 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Nicolina Montesano Montessori (HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht): TBC

7th June 2024, 12 noon UK TIME, Bernhard Forchtner (University of Leicester): TBC

 

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The programme Winter Term 2023-2024:

20 October 2023, 12noon-1pm (note the different time) John Dryzek (University of Canberra) 'The Rise (and Fall?) of Grey Radicalism'

17 November 2023, 1-2pm, Tom Bartlett (University of Glasgow),  Just Transitions to sustainable practice - Is there a role for discourse analysts?

15 December 2023, 1-2pm, Anabella Carvalho (University of Minho), Political imaginaries and climate change

****POSTPONED**** Ben Clarke, (Göteborgs universitet), TBC