My name is William Dance and I’m one of two new Senior Research Associates in CASS.

I’m currently finishing my PhD in the linguistics department here and my main research interests are corpus approaches to deception and manipulation, using methods like (critical) discourse analysis to study online disinformation (better known as ‘fake news’).

I’m working alongside Tara Coltman-Patel on the new ESRC-funded ‘Questioning Vaccination Discourse’ Project (or Quo VaDis – Latin for ‘Where are you going?’). Alongside collaborators from Public Health England, UCL, and University of Leeds, the project looks at how the public, press, and policymakers speak and write about vaccinations both online and offline. The goal of the project (which believe it or not was submitted before the COVID-19 pandemic!) is to get a better understanding of how pro- and anti-vaccination views spread online, as well as how the vaccine uncertain people in the middle express their views.

I’ve found myself over the last few years researching topics just as they seem to gain global attention. I started researching disinformation during my Masters just as Donald Trump was elected president and “fake news” become a hot topic. Similarly, I joined the Quo VaDis just as a global pandemic began and vaccination became more important than ever before.

My research into disinformation has given me some amazing opportunities over the past few years. I’ve had the fortune to do things like present my research to parliamentarians, second to Whitehall for three months, and work with over 50 news organisations and state broadcasters to disseminate my research and help inform the public about online deception. This kind of external engagement is a theme throughout all of my work and I always try to reach out to communities outside of academia whenever I can. I also run a blog which you can find here.

Disinformation is a wide-reaching topic and my research on this has mainly focused on areas such as social media users’ motivations for sharing disinformation, analysing hostile-state information operations (HSIOs), with future publications focusing on exploring algorithmic disinformation and the spread of online disinformation.

Outside of work, one of my favourite hobbies is baking. This is something I do most evenings and weekends as I enjoy planning and writing recipes, and then baking things for friends and family (although I enjoy the washing up a lot less…). I’ve been baking and cooking pretty much since I could walk as I was taught to cook from a young age. You can see some of my creations here but my favourite thing to bake is bread.

I think the best way to end this introduction is just to say how much I’m looking forward to what the Quo VaDis project, and working in CASS in general, has to offer. I’m grateful to be working in the one of the best corpus research centres in the world and I can’t wait to see what the next three years brings.