We are delighted to announce that CASS has been awarded £2.5 million funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Lancaster University to continue existing activities and pursue a new research programme for five more years, from April 2018 to March 2023.
The funding, which includes £750,000 from the ESRC, will be used to maximise the economic and societal impact of the research carried out in the first phase of the Centre, particularly in the areas of: Corporate Communications; Climate Change and Maritime Security; Language Development, Disorders and Environment; and Spoken Learner Language.
In addition, a new research programme will extend the facilitative and transformative power of corpus methods to the study of health (care) communication, in the following areas:
- Language and mental health (including: communication about anxiety disorder; presentation and diagnosis of psychosis; depression in users of social media);
- Communicating and diagnosing chronic pain;
- Media representations of obesity;
- English language assessment and training for medical professionals.
The Centre will also continue to create new openly accessible corpora, extend the existing programme of methodological and technological innovation, especially through #LancsBox and CQPWeb, and continue to disseminate methods and tools through the Corpus MOOC, Summer Schools and free workshops in the UK and internationally.
The new CASS team brings together 15 scholars from different disciplines at Lancaster University and two collaborating institutions: Durham University and University College London (see below).
Two postdoctoral Research Associates will also be recruited to work with the rest of the team for the next five years.
CASS Director Professor Elena Semino said: “We are absolutely delighted to have been awarded five more years of funding by the ESRC and grateful to the University for its part in supporting the Centre.
“This award will ensure that the work we have done so far achieves its full potential in terms of societal impact, and will enable us to carry out new research on communication about illness and healthcare.”
CASS is one eight established research centres awarded a total of £6.9m to continue their work under a new funding model designed to secure the long term sustainability of social science research excellence in the UK.
Watch this space for updates on the Centre’s work and the release of new tools and corpora!
The CASS team from April 2018:
Principal Investigator:
Elena Semino – Linguistics and English Language (Lancaster University)
Co-Investigators:
Andrew Hardie – Linguistics and English Language (Lancaster University)
Paul Baker – Linguistics and English Language (Lancaster University)
Vaclav Brezina – Linguistics and English Language (Lancaster University)
Dana Gablasova – Linguistics and English Language (Lancaster University)
Claire Hardaker – Linguistics and English Language (Lancaster University)
John Pill – Linguistics and English Language (Lancaster University)
Dimitrinka Atanasova – Linguistics and English Language (Lancaster University)
Basil Germond – Politics, Philosophy and Religion (Lancaster University)
Garrath Williams – Politics, Philosophy and Religion (Lancaster University)
Kate Cain – Psychology (Lancaster University)
Steve Young – Accounting and Finance (Lancaster University)
Angela Woods – English Studies and Hearing the Voice project (Durham University)
Joanna Zakrzewska – University College London Hospitals
Collaborator:
Zsófia Demjén – UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics (University College London)