Research Overview

I am a researcher whose main interest is the role of language in our social lives. This includes exploring the multimodal nature of communication and areas such as health communication, dementia, ageing and the environment. I am especially interested in how lived experience might intersect with professional and public discourses for dementia, and in the role of both language and images in communicating about this topic.

Currently, I'm the Senior Research Associate for the project ‘Public Discourses of Dementia: Challenging stigma and promoting personhood’, led by Dr Gavin Brookes. This project examines linguistic and visual representations of dementia across a range of contexts, combining corpus and multimodal approaches to discourse. The role builds upon my doctoral research at the University of Nottingham (completed in May 2022), which explores how participants differently affected by dementia represent the condition and respond to examples of dementia representations in the public sphere. I've developed this work into an open-access book, entitled Navigating Dementia and Society: Exploring how people affected by dementia negotiate and reshape popular discourses.

I convene the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Health & Science Communication Special Interest Group and am on the current organising committee for the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care (IC4CH). IC4CH aims to conduct evidence-based research to improve understandings of the role of communication in a wide range of healthcare contexts. I’ve also previously been the Production Editor for the Journal of Languages, Texts, and Society (Issue 4) and worked as part of the Linguistic Profiling for Professionals team. I review for a range of journals, including Frontiers, Qualitative Health Communication, Dementia, Gender & Language, The Gerontologist, Qualitative Research in Health, Research in Corpus Linguistics and International Journal of Qualitative Methods.

Teaching wise, I have experience of lecturing at masters and undergraduate level at Lancaster University (Corpus Linguistics LING421 and LING103 Linguistics respectively), alongside teaching seminars at undergraduate level (LING103 Linguistics at Lancaster University and 'Language and Linguistics' at University of Nottingham).

Beyond research, I really value building and supporting different communities, which is reflected in my present role as a research-only staff representative and network co-founder/co-lead. Previously, I've helped to coordinate a peer mentoring programme for researchers (Adapt Together, University of Nottingham) and an early career Health Humanities research group, alongside volunteering with local dementia and carer groups.