Workshop on ‘Metaphor in end of life care’ at St Joseph’s Hospice, London

On 26th September 2014, three members of the CASS-affiliated ‘Metaphor in end of life care’ project team were invited to run a workshop at St Joseph’s Hospice in London. The workshop was attended by 27 participants, including clinical staff, non-clinical staff and volunteers.

Veronika Koller (Lancaster University) introduced the project, including its background, rationale, research questions, data and use of corpus methods in combination with qualitative analysis. Zsófia Demjén (The Open University) and Elena Semino (Lancaster University) presented the findings from the project that are particularly relevant to communication between healthcare professionals and patients nearing the end of their lives. These findings include: how patients diagnosed with terminal cancer use Violence and Journey metaphors to talk about their experiences of illness and treatment; and how patients and healthcare professionals use a variety of metaphors to talk about their mutual relationships. The project team pointed out the different ‘framings’ provided by different uses of metaphor, particularly in terms of the empowerment and disempowerment of patients. They provided evidence that no metaphor is inherently good or bad for all patients, but rather suggested that different metaphors work differently for different people, or even for the same person at different times. In the final session, Veronika Koller introduced the ‘Metaphor Menu’ – a collection of metaphors used by cancer sufferers, which the team are planning to pilot as a resource for newly-diagnosed patients.

A lively discussion followed each presentation, with many members of the audience asking questions and contributing their personal and professional experiences. The workshop received very positive evaluations in anonymous feedback questionnaires: 83% of participants rated the session at 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale (where 1 corresponds to ‘Very poor’ and 5 to ‘Excellent’). Comments included: Very interesting research & resonated with my experience. Food for thought!’ and ‘Will help with my area of care, will help me understand and think about what my patients and relatives are actually telling me. Will make me reflect and respond more appropriately’.

Call for Participation: ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences

We are very pleased to issue the first call for participation for our ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences, which will take place at Lancaster University 16th-19th July 2013. This event takes place under the aegis of CASS, a new ESRC research centre bringing a new method in the study of language – the corpus approach – to a range of social sciences. CASS is investigating the use and manipulation of language in society in a host of areas of pressing concern, including climate change, hate crime and education.

Who can attend?

A crucial part of the CASS remit is to provide researchers across the social sciences with the skills needed to apply the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics to the research questions that matter in their own discipline. This event is aimed at junior social scientists – especially PhD students and postdoctoral researchers – in any of the social science disciplines. Anyone with an interest in the analysis of social issues via text and discourse – especially on a large scale – will find this summer school of interest.

Note: This summer school is aimed at beginners who have little or no experience using corpus tools in their work. Those  who have at least some introductory experience of analysis using language corpora, and who wish to expand their knowledge of key issues and techniques in cutting-edge corpus research, will be more interested in the UCREL Summer School in Corpus Linguistics.

Programme

The programme consists of a series of intensive two-hour sessions, some involving practical work, others more discussion-oriented. Topics include: Introduction to corpus linguistics; Corpus tools and techniques; Collecting corpus data; Foundational techniques for social science data – keywords and collocation; Understanding statistics for corpus analysis; Discourse analysis for the social sciences; Semantic annotation and key domains; Corpus-based approaches to metaphor in discourse; Pragmatics, politeness and impoliteness in the corpus. Speakers include Paul Baker, Jonathan Culpeper, and Elena Semino.

The CASS Summer School is part of three ‘Lancaster Summer Schools in Interdisciplinary Digital Methods’, see the website for further information. There are additional daily plenary lectures shared with the other two Summer School events, each illustrating cutting-edge digital research methods using corpus data. The confirmed plenary speakers are Tony McEnery, Ian Gregory, and Stephen Pumfrey.

How to apply

The CASS Summer School is free to attend, but registration in advance is compulsory, as places are limited. For more details, see the website.