Kat Gupta speaking at the "'Trans' in Popular Representation" event at the University of Warwick

Date(s): Thursday 28th November 2013 (09:00-17:00)
Description: Kat Gupta, researcher at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, is holding a talk at the "‘Trans’ in Popular Representation" event at the University of Warwick on November 28, 2013. Kat will present their corpus research on the media representation of Lucy Meadows' death, focusing particularly on the use of pronouns.
In March 2013, Lucy Meadows was found dead at her home. Meadows, a primary school teacher, was transitioning from male to female; the school announced her decision to return to work after the Christmas break as Miss Meadows. This was reported in the local press and quickly picked up by the national press. Her death prompted discussions of responsible media reporting, press freedom and the contributions of trans* people to society.
Kat collected two corpora of newspaper articles: one of articles mentioning Lucy Meadows and a larger one of general news articles. These corpora were then used to identify keywords – words that occur more frequently in the Lucy Meadows texts than might be expected from examining the collection of general news texts. More about Kat's research can be found on their research blog.

Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics

The University of Nottingham
Nottingham
NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5900
fax: +44 (0) 115 951 5924
email: cral@nottingham.ac.uk