Research projects

This research develops a new framework for the sociolinguistic analysis of intersectionality, whereby factors such as gender, race, and age combine to marginalise speakers in unique ways. It demonstrates how sociolinguists can account for this in their analyses of identity construction. The framework builds upon discourse analysis of interview data with LGBTQ+ youth, which has already been collected via ethnographic fieldwork (funded through a BA Small Grant). The analysis explores the links between the young people’s lived experiences and their positioning of themselves, through their language use, in relation to the wider world.

Through an exploration of how the young people communicate multifaceted and variable aspects of their identity, the intersectional framework will be outlined and demonstrated. Via a series of public engagement interventions developed in partnership with the young people, the research will also enhance understanding of the language of LGBTQ+ identity and the intersectional nature of structural inequality.

The Horizon institute is a multidisciplinary centre of excellence for Digital Economy (DE) research. The core mission of Horizon has been to balance the opportunities arising from the capture, analysis and use of personal data with an awareness and understanding of human and social values. Horizon now encompasses over 50 researchers, spanning Computing, Engineering, Law, Psychology, Social Sciences, Business and the Humanities.

This proposal builds on our established interdisciplinary competencies to deliver research and impact to ensure that future data-driven products can be both co-created and trusted by consumers.

Core to our current vision is the idea that future products will be hybrids of both the digital and the physical. Physical products are increasingly augmented with digital capabilities, from data footprints that capture their provenance to software that enables them to adapt their behaviour. Conversely, digital products are ultimately physically experienced by people in some real-world context and increasingly adapt to both.

Throughout we aim to continue to develop the capacity in our researchers, the wider DE research community and more broadly within society, to engage in responsible innovation using personal data within the Digital Economy.

People with hearing loss change their communication behaviour in various ways; avoiding social situations, partaking in them but not engaging, or engaging but failing to communicate satisfactorily. Such coping strategies are reflected in conversational behaviour patterns at microscopic (momentary, in conversation) and macroscopic (lifestyle, in social engagement) timescales. In this ESRC funded collaborative PhD project, Diana Zsaitseva will first apply qualitative techniques to conceptualize verbal interaction behaviour in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired adults. Then she will harness novel technologies to acquire objective data about people’s daily-life conversation behaviour. The insights arising from this work may lead to improved hearing devices, and better counselling models in hearing rehabilitation.

This project is co-supervised between the School of English (Professor Svenja Adolphs) and the School of Medicine (Professor Graham Naylor). Sonova AG, the collaborating partner, is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of hearing aids and cochlear implants. 

 
The recent surge in popularity of wild swimming (also referred to as open water swimming or cold water swimming), or swimming in natural 'blue spaces', including rivers, lakes or the sea, has highlighted the significant scale of opportunity to leverage the use of blue spaces as community assets to combat health inequalities. However, despite the well documented physical and mental health benefits of wild swimming that are relevant to large groups of the population suffering from ill health, current prevention and intervention strategies that focus on wild swimming to mitigate health inequalities tend to be local, place-based and disparate, and lack an overall joined-up approach that would allow them to be scaled up to benefit whole communities as part of established health policy.

In collaboration with our project partners (Swim England, Black Swimming Association, The National Trust, Freshwater Biological Association, UK Centre for Hydrology and Ecology, Leicestershire County Council, Social Prescribing at Partners Health, and Thrive health content developers), we have identified one of the main barriers to scaling up successful place-based approaches: the current lack of integrated information about the mental and physical health benefits of wild swimming alongside the risks related to water quality and safety aspects of specific blue spaces that people use for swimming.

Together with our project partners, we bring to bear our combined interdisciplinary expertise to address the following two main research questions:

1. How can we co-create an evidence base and sample content about wild swimming that will facilitate scale up of local approaches and initiatives to combat health inequalities?

2. What kind of mechanisms and relationships need to be formed and formalised to scale up approaches that leverage blue spaces to combat health inequalities through wild swimming?

Our project will have significant benefits for users within and beyond the academic community. We will develop a new mixed methods approach, drawing on corpus linguistics and narrative analysis, to create effective public health messaging that includes content from a range of academic disciplines. The project will benefit the many individuals and diverse communities who will be enabled to enjoy wild swimming in a safe way to improve health, and to gain an increased awareness of the nature of blue spaces and their role as a community asset.

Working with colleagues from Cardiff University, Mary Immaculate College, Swansea University, The University of Nottingham, University College Dublin, and University of Aberdeen, this AHRC/IRC funded project first aims to examine virtual workplace communication to gain depth of insight into the potential barriers to effective communication. Our second aim is to propose the next generation of frameworks for analysing online discourse and will make these frameworks available to all arts and humanities research and end user communities. This will lead to a step change in our ability to develop equality of access in online communication. The project team received £390,000 from AHRC and €270,000 from IRC for this project, to be undertaken from 2021-24.

You can visit the project website for more information.