Research Agenda

“Difference is the motor that produces texts. Where there is no difference, no text comes into being.” (Gunther Kress, 1985)

“Identity is always a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative.” (Stuart Hall, 1997)

My research agenda is organized around a core interest in the ways people use language and other semiotic modes to make sense of social difference in everyday communication. Specifically, I am keen to understand how identities of privilege and ideologies of inequality are discursively produced; this may be achieved through face-to-face exchanges, in mediatized representations (e.g. newspapers, magazines), or in the contexts of digital media.

My work draws on a range of academic traditions concerned with language and communication: sociolinguistics, discourse studies, linguistic anthropology, and cultural studies. More specifically, my work is framed by the analytic principles and objectives of three closely allied approaches: critical discourse studies, critical sociolinguistcs, and social semiotics. In keeping with their grounding in critical/social theory, both approaches attend also to questions of ideology/power and the interplay of micro-level social processes and macro-level social structures.

The main topics of my research agenda have, for some time, been language and global mobility (tourism discourse), and language and digital media (digital discourse). These are both major sites for the production of cultural difference and symbolic inequality. More recently, my work has centered on language and social class (elite discourse), and language at work (professional discourse). This work is reflected in my recent and ongoing projects.