School of English

This page shows the staff for the University of Nottingham's School of English in the UK. Please see here for the School of Education and English in China and the School of English in Malaysia.

Image of Lucy Jones

Lucy Jones

Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics, Faculty of Arts

Contact

Biography

BA, MA, PhD (Sheffield); PGCHE (Edge Hill); FHEA

I work in the area of language, gender and sexuality (or queer linguistics) within the broader field of sociolinguistics. My research makes use of critical discourse analysis and sociocultural linguistics alongside feminist and queer theory. In most of my published research, I've used linguistic ethnography to explore identity construction in communities of practice. This includes an older lesbian group and, more recently, multiple LGBTQ+ youth groups.

Most recently, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with young LGBTQ+ people in four socioeconomically and culturally variable locations in the UK. I am examining the strategies used by the young people to negotiate norms and ideologies of gender and sexuality in their everyday interaction. Specifically, the project is focused on intersectionality to consider how factors such as the young people's socioeconomic class, ethnicity, location, and support networks impact on their experiences as LGBTQ+ people and their subsequent identity constructions. As part of this, I have worked with the young people to develop an LGBT+ Youth Manifesto (a social media campaign sharing their vision of a more inclusive society) and a briefing paper for policy-makers. The briefing paper making a series of recommendations for best practice regarding the support of young LGBTQ+ people; watch this short video summarising these recommendations or read the policy brief here.

Other published projects include discourse analysis of Fifty Shades of Grey fan pages on social media, representations of same-sex marriage and HIV prevention in the mainstream media, Twitter discourse around the hashtag #NotAllMen, and the naming choices of people who get married. I've also analysed identity construction in transgender YouTube video diaries as well as narratives produced by patients at a transgender health clinic.

For more information about my research, including recent presentations and work in progress, please visit my blog at http://queerlinglang.wordpress.com/. You can follow me on Twitter @jones_lucy.

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8947-9577

Expertise Summary

I am currently the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the Faculty of Arts. I am also the academic lead for the University's work on LGBTQIA+, including setting up and co-chairing the institutional LGBTQIA+ Steering Group. In addition, I sit on the University Senate as a staff representative for the Faculty of Arts.

I was elected to the BAAL Special Interest Group on Language, Gender and Sexuality board in 2013, and the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) committee in 2015. I am on the Organising Committee for the annual conference on Language and Sexuality (Lavender Languages and Linguistics), and hosted this at Nottingham in April 2017. I was an Editorial Board member for the Journal of Language and Sexuality from 2013-18, and am currently the journal's Editor for Book Reviews. I served on the Editorial Board for the journal Gender and Language between 2017-2020, and have been a member of the Advisory Board for the Journal of Language and Discrimination since 2016. I also chair the North and Midlands Language, Gender and Sexuality Reading Group. I have been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2012.

Teaching Summary

Undergraduate modules

Language in Society

Language and Feminism

Studying Language

Postgraduate modules

Language, Gender and Sexuality

Selected Publications

I welcome research proposals from prospective postgraduate students with an interest in the relationships between language and identity, both in terms of interaction and representation, and particularly in relation to gender and/or sexuality; discourse analysis, including ethnographic approaches and those making use of critical discourse analysis; feminist and queer linguistics; media discourse.

Previous and current PhD students who I've supervised have worked on projects including: the representation of queer women in an online corpus; cross-cultural multi-modal critical discourse analysis of advertisements in British and Arabic women's magazines; discourses of teenage abortion; immigration discourse in the UK Government; identity and language in an online asexuality forum; taboo language and homophobia; discourse and identity in the House of Lords.

School of English

Trent Building
The University of Nottingham
University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5900
email: english-enquiries@nottingham.ac.uk