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Cross-cultural Perspectives on the Climate Crisis
In this talk, I reflect a number of studies which have involved the use of a combination of corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis, and metadiscourse analysis to access the social and cultural discursive construction of the climate crisis by experts. I present, as part of this talk, a rationale for studying expert discourses, arguing that they offer insight into culturally shaped epistemologies of the climate crisis and opportunities of enhancing public engagement with climate-themed research. I then present the data on which these studies have been conducted, The Conversation Corpus of Climate Discourses in English, French, and Spanish. Subsequently, through a series of case studies I discuss (1) the role of questioning in expert discourses on the climate crisis, (2) the intersection of crisis discourses in climate-themed texts, (3) the representation of death in the climate crisis, and (4) the discursive construction of climate adaptation in the Australian context.
For (1), I draw on both bottom-up discourse analysis (i.e., what do we question and what does this mean) and top-down metadiscourse analysis (i.e., how do we question the climate crisis and what (con)textual function does questioning perform). For (2), an epistemological lens is adopted to frame the analysis and reflect on the ways in which the climate and health polycrisis is constructed by experts in English, French, and Spanish. For (3), I focus on the language of death in the English corpus. In doing so, I use collocation analysis to identify patterns in the social construction of the death in the climate crisis and draw attention to naturalised ways of thinking surrounding death and the implications of such research for understanding better knowledge construction and dissemination. Finally, for (4), a transitivity analysis is employed to identify key, highly frequent, and widely dispersed verbs that allow us to better understand how adaptation is framed as a process and how this process relates to participants (i.e., actors and goals) as well as the circumstances in which they are situated.
Through these studies, I endeavour to demonstrate the myriad ways in which experts can construct and reconstruct ideological positionings of the climate crisis in their texts, shedding light on cross-cultural variation, the emergence of dominant discourses and processes of naturalisation, and the backgrounding of relevant participants. In this way, I urge the community of researchers dedicated to unpacking the ideological reconstruction, reconstitution, and recontextualisation of climate discourses to turn their attention to expert discourses as a means to identify ways in which science communication can be further developed ethically, culturally, and interculturally.
Bio Note
Dr Niall Curry is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Information and Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University, specialising in applied linguistics, contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis. He is Series Co-Editor of the Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics and Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides book series, Section Editor of Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, and a Fellow of The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. He is the author of Academic Writing and Reader Engagement, published by Routledge in 2021, and his most recent publications address climate discourses across languages and cultures, AI in corpus and discourse studies, function-to-form corpus pragmatics, discourse studies of global crises, and the representation of spoken language in education materials. For more information about his work, recent publications, and editorial and service work, see here.