Language and Communication Research Group
About us
The Language and Communication research cluster grows out of research by staff across a number of subject areas in the University. Its members carry out research into the philosophy and theory of communication, pragmatics, the definition of language as a human phenomenon, gender and age in language use, political communication in language, narrative, language in critical theory, semiotics and rhetoric.
In particular, the group shares an interest in the history and practice of 'close reading'. That is, the process of analysis and attention to all kinds of texts, a process that came to the fore in the last century with the work of Saussure in Switzerland; Propp and the Formalists in Russia; Ogden, Richards, Empson and Leavis in Britain; the New Criticism, Innis, McLuhan and Frye in North America; the structuralists in France; the Prague Linguistic Circle in Czechoslovakia; so-called 'Soviet semiotics'; the Copenhagen School in Denmark; systems theory and cybernetics in Europe and the Americas.
This current of thought and practice continues today with Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis, investigations into Multimodality, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Modelling Systems Theory and other approaches in the study of language and communication.
Cluster members currently research and publish on topics including prosody, Parliamentary discourse, religion and utopia, narrative, discourses about food and ageing and metaphysics of communication.
The cluster is also home to the journal Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, co-home to the journal Social Semiotics and the book series Handbooks of Communication Science, and is closely involved in the Section for the Philosophy of Communication of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).
Language and Communication research seminars
The Language and Communication research cluster hosts regular research seminars that explore work on language, discourse and communication. Literature, creative writing and even film are also considered, taking an inclusive view of the subject area. They include research presentations, workshops and reading groups.
In previous years we explored Monsters in Popular Cultural Texts (from witches and vampires, to zombies and werewolves), national and sexual identities, interpretation, reformation, multimodality and supercategory semantics; naming practices, archival research, the Gothic, reading on screen, visual semiotics and site-specific drama; creative criticism, languaging, language innovation and change, accents in film and television, intertextuality reimagining Orwell, city poetry, American metafiction, narrative, fictionalising transatlantic slavery.
The sessions are free and open to all staff, students and guests. For more information or if you would like to lead a session, contact Anna Charalambidou.
Workshops and projects
- Middlesex Roundtable
- Consuming Authenticities
- The Grenglish Community Engagement Project
- Ernst Bloch Centre
Additional projects
- Political Communication: gender and linguistic participation in parliaments; political interviews
- Pre-school narratives: psychological causality in contemporary media for children
- Communicating Wisdom: A Study of Fishing in Youth Work
- Ontological Generosity: The Communicability of Being.