The Nottingham Health Humanities Cluster in collaboration with the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL) at the University of Nottingham is pleased to host Professor Elena Semino who will give a talk on Metaphors and narratives in health communication. Her talk will be followed by a roundtable discussion with leading researchers in the field.
Professor Elena Semino (Lancaster University)
Metaphors and narratives are well known to be central tools for communication and thinking. In this talk, I consider their role in different areas of communication about health and illness: lived-experience accounts of chronic pain and cancer, and pro- and anti-vaccination messaging. I show how, in all these different contexts, metaphors and narratives are combined in order to achieve a range of communicative purposes, including emotional disclosure, reconceptualization and persuasion. I also consider the practical implications and applications of my analyses for sensitive and effective communication in clinical and public health settings.
Speaker Bio: Elena Semino is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. She is the director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences, as well as a member and current lead of the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care. Her research interests are in health communication, medical humanities, stylistics, and metaphor theory and analysis. Her work combines qualitative analysis with corpus linguistic methods. One of the many projects she is currently involved with is the ESRC-funded project Questioning Vaccination Discourse: A Corpus-based Study, applying linguistic methods to better understand pro- and anti-vaccination views.
Roundtable Discussion:
Peter Stockwell (chair) (University of Nottingham)
Elena Semino (Lancaster University)
Sophie Clapp (Head Archivist at Boots)
Kevin Harvey (University of Nottingham)
Svenja Adolphs (University of Nottingham)