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Representations of Obesity in the News: Project update and book announcement!
Gavin Brookes and Paul Baker We are delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of a book based on research carried out as part of the CASS project, ‘Representations of Obesity in the News’. The book, titled Obesity in the News: Language and Representation in the Press, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.…
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ICR Outstanding Corpus Thesis Award for Lancaster PhD graduate
I am honoured to have received the Institute for Corpus Research Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. The purpose of this annual award is to recognise and reward theses in the field of Corpus Linguistics. I conducted my PhD research in the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, which is part of Department…
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Questioning Vaccination Discourse (Quo VaDis): A Corpus-based Study
A new three-year project based in CASS will use corpus linguistic methods to study how vaccinations (including future vaccines for Covid-19) are talked about in the UK press, UK parliamentary discourse and social media. Through collaborations with governmental and public health partners, the findings will be used to help address vaccine hesitancy, which is one…
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English language assessment and training for medical professionals
Proficiency in English is crucial for effective and appropriate medical communication and U.K. regulating bodies for nurse and doctor practitioners use standardised tests (such as IELTS, OET, TOEFL) to assess English proficiency of non-UK/EU applicants. The aim of this project is to investigate a corpus of authentic clinical interactions to identify patterns of interaction and…
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CASS joins International Consortium for Communication in Health Care
We are delighted to announce that we are joining the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care. The Consortium is led by the Australian National University, and also includes University College London, Nanyang Technological University, the University of Hong Kong and Queensland University of Technology. The aim of the Consortium is to conduct research that increases…
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Covid-19 and the International Baccalaureate
A month passed, but yet our pain hasn’t diminished and justice unserved (#ibscandal, Aug 6) Three months ago, when I wrote my introductory post for the CASS blog, I had a clear research plan for my SSHRC (Canada’s Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council) postdoctoral fellowship, which involved examining IB discourses in a large corpus…
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PhD conference prize for James Balfour
I am honoured to have received the award for “student research with the most potential for impact” at the 2020 Corpora and Discourse International conference this year. The award, which included a prize of £150, was sponsored by Palgrave and decided through nominations from conference attendees. The talk can be accessed online here: https://corporadiscourse.com/healthcare-representations-videos/ The…
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‘A fire raging’: Why fire metaphors work well for Covid-19
Covid-19 and metaphors Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, metaphors have been widely used, reflected upon and critiqued as a tool for communicating about the virus and its consequences. There are good reasons for this. Metaphors involve talking and thinking about one thing in terms of another, on the basis of perceived similarities or…
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PhD conference prize for Mark Wilkinson
At the 2020 Corpora and Discourse International Conference, I was very honoured to receive an award for the conference paper “showing the greatest methodological innovation or reflexivity by a student researcher”. The award was sponsored by the Applied Corpus Linguistics journal and included a prize of £250. This year’s online conference, hosted by the University of Sussex,…
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From careful to careless reporting: The effect of COVID-19 on the representation of Islam and Muslims – Isobelle Clarke
In my current position, funded by the Aziz Foundation, in the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences at Lancaster University, I am investigating the representation of Muslims and Islam in the UK press. Previous research has revealed the major press representations of Islam and Muslims between 1998 to 2009 and between 2010 to 2014…
CASS Briefings
CASS: Briefings is a series of short, quick reads on the work being done at the ESRC/CASS research centre at Lancaster University, UK.