In the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, we’re celebrating our 50th anniversary in 2024. In a series of public lectures, we will showcase our recent research in different areas of linguistics. Everyone is welcome!

Our next talk should be of particular interest to corpus linguists, forensic linguists, and researchers broadly interested in the security and protection sciences:

Title: The shared anti-science discourses

Speaker: Dr Isobelle Clarke (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about/people/isobelle-clarke)

Abstract: Anti-science discourse has been studied through the optic of particular governments (Carter et al., 2019) or specific topics, such as anti-vaccination (Davis, 2019), anti-genetically modified organisms (Cook et al. 2004), stem cell research (Marcon, Murdoch and Caulfield, 2017), and climate denial discourse (Park, 2015). This research often details the development and content of the anti-science position and discourses. Yet, little is known about how the discourses compare across topics. Are there anti-science discourses that are shared across topics or does the discourse vary with the topic? In this talk, I will present the results of the common discourses which are shared between texts from websites known to promote pseudoscience and conspiracy on the topics of stem cells, climate change, vaccination and genetically modified organisms.

For details of this talk and the upcoming programme, please visit our 50th anniversary website: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/50th-anniversary/

Register to attend: https://www.trybooking.com/uk/events/landing/68278

Date and time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (UTC+01), Thursday 24th October 2024

Location: Faraday Lecture Theatre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YW

Getting to the University: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/about-us/maps-and-travel/

Linguistic Field(s): Forensic Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)