C Thurlow
Biographic Data
| ID | 53303 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Thurlow |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Thurlow |
| SIGNATURE | THURLOW C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bern |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3203-9255 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 490 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Designing (Dis)Engagement: Reading the Throwaway Waste Exhibition as a Spatial Text
Grounded in discard studies and space-attentive discourse studies, this article reports a social semiotic analysis of the Throwaway exhibition at the Museum of European History in Brussels, Belgium (2023–2024). Paying particular attention to the exhibition’s compositional and interactive meanings, my analysis documents how waste and waste-making are narrated through a range of different visual-material-spatial resources; for example, diegetic and…
Behind the screen: Turning to language work in the movies
Transmodal practice and embodied style in audio description: Thinking beyond the academic “but”
This paper considers the language work done by audio describers and, specifically, their transmodalization of bodily actions and movements into language. Orienting to embodied sociolinguistics and social semiotics, my analysis is empirically grounded in a combination of primary reading, interviews with leading practitioners, as well as a participant observation of an audio-described dance performance. On this basis and informed by Macgilchrist’s …
Engaging the stuff of words: Language materiality and symbolic power
A contribution from multimodality studies, this paper offers a practice- and teaching-oriented approach to the stuff of words. I start by introducing language materiality , a heuristic framework proposed by linguistic anthropologists, but grounding it in four allied precedents: cultural studies , dispositif analysis , mediated discourse , and social semiotics . Then, drawing on illustrative case studies from my own work, I demonstrate a two-part …
Regrounding work in elite discourse: Mediatizing and amplifying entitlement
This paper considers the interplay of small-scale pragmatic actions and large-scale discursive formations; specifically, we examine frame-shifting and keying in the globally syndicated BBC television show Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby . Focusing on the fourth season of Amazing Hotels , which broadcast in 2021, we document how work and workers are staged for entertainment as quintessential examples of a non-serious frame that Goffman calle…
Working beside/s words: A case study in the partiality and provinciality of language
Part visual essay, the case study reported here considers the classist implications of over-attending to (spoken) language in the workplace. Rooted in the core principle of multimodality, the paper surfaces ways of doing/knowing which inevitably sit beside (next to) words, but which also sometimes exist besides (in spite of) words. The empirical stimulus for the paper is fieldwork conducted in Extremadura, Spain; here, in fields and factories, we…
Staging a tomatoscape: A case study in place branding and/as semiotic reflexivity
A strategic, often spectacular intersection of semiosis and spatiality, place branding should be an obvious topic for linguistic landscape research. Isolated studies which do attend to branding seem insufficiently concerned with its conceptual and metasemiotic complexity. Part visual essay, my paper examines the small Spanish town of Miajadas which, in a performative act of scale-jumping, declares itself Tomato Capital of Europe . Drawing on fiel…
Des relations éphémères. Une sociolinguistique du tourisme
Dans cet article, nous présentons une analyse de quatre types d'échanges linguistiques différents dans le domaine du tourisme. Ce faisant, nous démontrons que l'emprunt, l'appropriation et la réévaluation de la langue/des langues sont une caractéristique centrale des interactions entre hôtes et touristes. Ensemble, ces échanges linguistiques mettent en évidence la base sociolinguistique des relations éphémères ou transitoires du tourisme. À trave…
Dishing up Distinction: Language Materiality and Multimodal Coherence in Elite Foodways
This paper arises as part of a discourse-focused commodity chain analysis of elite foodways in the international airline industry. At the center of this critical intervention sits the business class airline meal as an epitomic manifestation of contemporary class privilege. As both a fraught social hieroglyphic and a complex semiotic assemblage, “premium” airline dining is articulated across different sites and through a range of different communi…
Rubbish? Envisioning a sociolinguistics of waste
English) As the opening statement in a curated dialogue on Language and Waste, this paper considers what a sociolinguistics of waste might look like. In the first two parts, I provide some general rationale and academic context for starting to notice waste. By avoiding the dirty places and raw lives of waste, sociolinguists obscure two important relations: first, the social worlds of people who live and work with/in waste; second, the social conn…
The discursive chronotopes of waste: Temporal laminations and linguistic hauntings
This article presents two case-study examples of the discursive chronotopes by which domestic waste is organized as a linguistic, spatial, and temporal configuration. Marked by their liminality and temporal laminations, curbside garbage collection and secondhand/thrift shops are major sociomaterial practices in Switzerland. The three discursive chronotopes we address in these contexts are those concerned with regulation, repression, and (re)valua…
Liquid power: Reading the infinity pool as a global semioscape
The analytic focus of this article is the highly fashionable ‘infinity pool’, treated here as a visual-material realization of the cultural politics of super-elite mobility. The article is organized around a three-step analytic structure. First, I demonstrate how the infinity pool is mediatized as a status marker, and thus circulated and normalized. Second, I pinpoint the semiotic and ideological ways the infinity pool emerges as a mediated pract…
Dissecting the language of elitism: The 'joyful' violence ofpremium
Aligned with renewed commitments to class critique in sociolinguistics and discourse studies, I examinepremiumas a floating signifier. My initial semiotic landscape analysis demonstrates how this word is attached to any number of goods/services, coaxing people into a sense of distinction and superior status. These language games occur most vividly in my second analytic site-Premium Economy-where status is fabricated as tangibly but not too obviou…
Analyse critique du discours dans / sur des contextes appliqués
Quel est l’engagement de l’analyse critique du discours avec le mondeprofessionnel ? Aujourd’hui plus que jamais, cette question est cruciale : le langageest au coeur de nombreux métiers non seulement comme compétence professionnellemais également comme produit effectif du travail. La présente contribution traite dedeux dimensions souvent oubliées dans les recherches sur le langage au travail : d’unepart, l’analyse du domaine de « l’artisanat du …
Beyond the managed heart? Seduction, subjugation and the symbolic economies of sleep
Sleep appears to have been of no interest to sociocultural linguistics or communication studies. This is in spite of growing attention to the "ignored third" from sociologists and anthropologists, especially in response to rising public, medical and commercial concerns. Having said which, these cognate fields side-step the classist representational politics of sleep which are exposed nicely by a social semiotic intervention like the one reported …
When globalese meets localese: Transformational tactics in the typographic landscape – a Bernese case study
This paper examines an annual anti-racism event in Bern, Switzerland, which, in 2016, was promoted with three posters designed around a distinctive kind of multimodal writing. In large black and white lettering, the posters voiced real and imagined immigrants in one of three statements including ĭ ŗĕđä õ ɓæřŋ d’űţśĉħ (I also speak Bernese). Each poster thereby combined the regional dialect of Swiss German (not usually written in official settings…
Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis
Conceptual linearity and analytic parochialism (aka focus) can make it more difficult for sociolinguists or discourse analysts to apprehend the far-reaching, exploitative ways inequality is nowadays produced. A suitably material-cum-materialist class critique certainly entails empirical and phenomenological worlds flagged by, for example, multi-sited ethnographies but otherwise side-lined as merely "extra-situational" in much talk/text-directed s…
X-Scapes: New horizons in linguistic landscapes
Preview this article: X-SCAPES, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ll.00011.thu-1.gif
Visualizing teens and technology: A social semiotic analysis of stock photography and news media imagery
Previous research on verbal representations shows how the news media consistently depicts young people’s uses of digital media in a narrow, negative light. In this article, we present an innovative methodology for demonstrating how young people and their digital practices are visually depicted. We focus on stock photography produced by the commercial image banks which source the news media with much of its imagery. Following an indicative analysi…
Semiotic creativities in and with space: Binaries and boundaries, beware
In the way of commentary, I offer a brief, summative reflection on the complex, multifarious nature of people’s semiotic engagements in and with space. Against the backdrop of three snapshot case studies, I suggest there are actually few neat boundaries to be drawn between the linguistic and non-linguistic, between the semiotic and the spatial, and between the creative and non-creative. These kinds of binarized ways of understanding linguistic-se…
Word-things and Thing-words: The Transmodal Production of Privilege and Status
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Forget about the words”? Tracking the language, media and semiotic ideologies of digital discourse: The case of sexting
Mediatizing the “super-rich,” normalizing privilege
The argument we make here is a straightforward one: constant news-media coverage of the excessive lifestyles and consumption patterns of the so called “super-rich” normalize their extreme privilege, while obfuscating the privilege of many others. We examine a series of typical news stories (“print” and “broadcast”) together with examples of popular books to show how the mediatization of the “super-rich” is ambivalently organized through a mixture…
Introducing elite discourse: The rhetorics of status, privilege, and power
This introductory paper offers a framing of elite discourse as the way elites and/or eliteness are depicted in language and communication, and the way language and communication are deployed for two elitist ends: the production of status and the maintenance of privilege/power. We sketch three orienting principles which have structured our special issue – targeting elitism, centring discourse and critical reflexivity – before presenting an overvie…
The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics
The underlying premise of this article is that the social meanings and cultural entanglements of the so-called super-rich or 1% reach far beyond any specific people or place. To be sure, the tightly managed, tailored spaces of super-elites are often less exclusive than first meets the eye, and the markers of super-elite status circulate in quite informal, banal ways. Drawing on a combination of textual and fieldwork data, we map three interlockin…
From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media
As a way of tracking popular framing of CMC, this article critically reviews an international corpus of 101 print-media accounts (from 2001 to 2005) of language-use in technologies such as instant messaging and text messaging. From the combined perspective of folk linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this type of metadiscourse (i.e., discourse about discourse) reveals the conceptual and ideological assumptions by which particular communic…
The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: Symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes
From a sample of 51 major international airlines, we offer a critical discourse analysis of so-called loyalty or frequent-flyer programmes and their related business-class services. As examples of cultural capital par excellence, these seemingly innocuous discursive formations act as significant agents of, and channels for, globalist relations of power in the context of international travel and tourism. The principal logic of frequent-flyer progr…
Introducing elite discourse: The rhetorics of status, privilege, and power
This introductory paper offers a framing of elite discourse as the way elites and/or eliteness are depicted in language and communication, and the way language and communication are deployed for two elitist ends: the production of status and the maintenance of privilege/power. We sketch three orienting principles which have structured our special issue – targeting elitism, centring discourse and critical reflexivity – before presenting an overvie…
Introduction: Sociolinguistics and tourism - mobilities, markets, multilingualism
In the introduction to this special issue on Sociolinguistics and Tourism, we focus on language in tourism as an important window into contemporary forms of economic, political, and social change. Our aim is twofold: (1) to establish and extend 'sociolinguistics and tourism' as another social and applied domain of sociolinguistic research; and (2) to use tourism as a lens for a broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of late modernity. To this…
Elite mobilities: The semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege
Tourism is immensely powerful in (re)organising large-scale inequalities and privileges. In the rapid expansion of 'luxury tourism' we find a wing of this truly global culture industry openly committed to the symbolic production of elite status, distinction and privilege. Our visual essay here offers a series of multimodal, multi-voiced statements arising from a research project that explores and critiques the lavish semiotic economies and strict…
Social roles and negotiation of status in host-tourist interaction: A view from British television holiday programmes
Although folk discourses frequently emphasise such raison d'être benefits of tourism as broadening one's horizons through knowing foreign people(s) and cultures, most critical studies of tourism stress tourists' relative illiteracy with regard to the 'reading' of the local. This paper is based on extracts from two British holiday programme series, BBC's Holiday 2000/1 and ITV's Wish You Were Here?, in which the presenters engage in some form of v…
Communicating a global reach: Inflight magazines as a globalizing genre in tourism
Like most multinational or international corporations, marketing for airlines hinges on careful strategies of differentiation and promotion; an increasingly important part of the way this is achieved is for airlines to position themselves as 'global' and to promise their passengers the kudos of being global citizens and travellers. It is in this way that globalization can be seen to be not about just economic reordering, but also strategic, comme…
National pride, global capital: A social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry
In this article we examine 561 different airline tailfin designs as a visual genre, revealing how the global-local binary may be managed and realized semiotically. Our analysis is organized into three strands: (a) a descriptive analysis identifies the strikingly restricted visual lexicon and dominant corporate aesthetic established by tailfin design; (b) an interpretive analysis considers the communicative strategies at play and the meaning poten…
Tourism discourse: Languages and banal globalization
Described as the "one of the greatest population movements of all time, " tourism is firmly established as one of the world's largest international trades.And it is not just people who are on tour; language too is on the move.In this paper we examine some of the ways that our research has shown language commonly being taken up in tourism's search for exoticity and authenticity.Specifically, we present a series of different touristic genres (broad…
Two hundred ninety-four: Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking
We offer here a multimodal discourse analysis of a range of verbal (writing and speech), nonverbal (movement and gesture) and technological (photography and video) resources used by tourists at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In doing so, we pin-point the recycling and layering of mediatized representations (e.g. guidebooks and official brochures), mediated actions (e.g. climbing the Tower or posing in front of it), and remediated practices (e.g. post…
Mediatizing the “super-rich,” normalizing privilege
The argument we make here is a straightforward one: constant news-media coverage of the excessive lifestyles and consumption patterns of the so called “super-rich” normalize their extreme privilege, while obfuscating the privilege of many others. We examine a series of typical news stories (“print” and “broadcast”) together with examples of popular books to show how the mediatization of the “super-rich” is ambivalently organized through a mixture…
The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics
The underlying premise of this article is that the social meanings and cultural entanglements of the so-called super-rich or 1% reach far beyond any specific people or place. To be sure, the tightly managed, tailored spaces of super-elites are often less exclusive than first meets the eye, and the markers of super-elite status circulate in quite informal, banal ways. Drawing on a combination of textual and fieldwork data, we map three interlockin…
Queering critical discourse studies or/and Performing ‘post-class’ ideologies
At the heart of this paper is a desire to queer critical discourse studies (CDS) a little: jabbing at our norms and wisdoms, poking around our spiritless or dispirited spaces, and perhaps nudging us towards some new possibilities. This impulse is prompted by my collaborative research on elitist discourse and so-called luxury tourism which also serve as the thematic focus of my paper here. Throughout this work, I have struggled to manage the affec…
Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis
Conceptual linearity and analytic parochialism (aka focus) can make it more difficult for sociolinguists or discourse analysts to apprehend the far-reaching, exploitative ways inequality is nowadays produced. A suitably material-cum-materialist class critique certainly entails empirical and phenomenological worlds flagged by, for example, multi-sited ethnographies but otherwise side-lined as merely "extra-situational" in much talk/text-directed s…
The Other Closet: Atheists, Homosexuals and the Lateral Appropriation of Discursive Capital
Previous studies have considered different forms of economic and/or cultural appropriation between status-unequal groups, for example young, White, middle-class people cashing in on the music of urban, African-American culture. In this paper, however, we are interested in what we call ‘lateral appropriation’, the process whereby the discursive capital of one marginalized group is usurped by another similarly marginalized group. In particular, dra…
Rubbish? Envisioning a sociolinguistics of waste
English) As the opening statement in a curated dialogue on Language and Waste, this paper considers what a sociolinguistics of waste might look like. In the first two parts, I provide some general rationale and academic context for starting to notice waste. By avoiding the dirty places and raw lives of waste, sociolinguists obscure two important relations: first, the social worlds of people who live and work with/in waste; second, the social conn…
Symbolic Capitals: Visual Discourse and Intercultural Exchange in the European Capital of Culture Scheme
In multilingual Europe, visual discourse may function as a cross-culturally strategic form of communication, thanks in part to its perceptual and iconic availability. In this regard, we offer a social semiotic critique of a range of visual resources deployed in he official promotional texts of 30 of the 43 cities either nominated or competing for he title of European Capital of Culture between 2005 and 2011. In considering the political/cultural/…
Visualizing teens and technology: A social semiotic analysis of stock photography and news media imagery
Previous research on verbal representations shows how the news media consistently depicts young people’s uses of digital media in a narrow, negative light. In this article, we present an innovative methodology for demonstrating how young people and their digital practices are visually depicted. We focus on stock photography produced by the commercial image banks which source the news media with much of its imagery. Following an indicative analysi…
Tracing Place, Locating Self: Embodiment and Remediation In/Of Tourist Spaces
Tourists’ encounters with/in places, while powerfully represented and organized by visual imagery, are also experienced through material exchange, social interaction and physical movement. We offer a visual ethnography of the embodied, re/mediating inter/actions of tourists in a range of different sites. Our images are organized into five compositional themes or narratives: (1) self-locational rituals and spectacles; (2) tactile engagements with …
Forget about the words”? Tracking the language, media and semiotic ideologies of digital discourse: The case of sexting
Against Technologization: Young People's New Media Discourse as Creative Cultural Practice
Educators, businesspeople, and journalists–all of them adults–seem very preoccupied nowadays with young people's supposed lack of "good" communication, leading to evaluation of their communication "skills" against standards of appropriateness and usefulness shaped by the needs of the market rather than everyday social and relational needs of communicators. This technologization of communication comes to a head in commentary (read: complaints) abo…
Dissecting the language of elitism: The 'joyful' violence ofpremium
Aligned with renewed commitments to class critique in sociolinguistics and discourse studies, I examinepremiumas a floating signifier. My initial semiotic landscape analysis demonstrates how this word is attached to any number of goods/services, coaxing people into a sense of distinction and superior status. These language games occur most vividly in my second analytic site-Premium Economy-where status is fabricated as tangibly but not too obviou…
Profiling "New" Communication Technologies In Adolescence
In an overview of some of the central issues concerning the impact and effects of new technology in adolescence, this article questions the reality of the "net generation" before considering the interplay of new and old technologies, the internet as both communication and lifestyle resource, and newer technologies like text messaging and webcams
The discursive chronotopes of waste: Temporal laminations and linguistic hauntings
This article presents two case-study examples of the discursive chronotopes by which domestic waste is organized as a linguistic, spatial, and temporal configuration. Marked by their liminality and temporal laminations, curbside garbage collection and secondhand/thrift shops are major sociomaterial practices in Switzerland. The three discursive chronotopes we address in these contexts are those concerned with regulation, repression, and (re)valua…
Beyond the managed heart? Seduction, subjugation and the symbolic economies of sleep
Sleep appears to have been of no interest to sociocultural linguistics or communication studies. This is in spite of growing attention to the "ignored third" from sociologists and anthropologists, especially in response to rising public, medical and commercial concerns. Having said which, these cognate fields side-step the classist representational politics of sleep which are exposed nicely by a social semiotic intervention like the one reported …
Naming the “outsider within”: Homophobic pejoratives and the verbal abuse of lesbian, gay and bisexual high-school pupils
Talkin' 'bout my Communication: Communication Awareness in Mid-Adolescence
What do young people actually know about communication? What do they think communication involves? How do they perceive their own communication practices? To what extent can they articulate this understanding and awareness? At first glance, these are strikingly simple questions, but ones which instance a line of investigation that more prescient writers have suggested might be worth pursuing. According to Sypher and Applegate (1984), for example,…
The Usual Suspects? A Comparative Investigation of Crowds and Social-type Labelling among Young British Teenagers
In the USA, reputation-based crowds (as opposed to interaction-based cliques) are a widespread, and widely reported, dimension of adolescent peer relations. To date, there is no such British literature. As part of a larger study, some 460 British secondary school pupils were asked to identify major groupings at school. Crowds accounted for almost half of all the groupings reported. While there was evidence of the usual panoply of these social typ…
The Uses and Representations of Local Languages in Tourist Destinations: A View from British TV Holiday Programmes
This paper analyses instances of the use and representation of local languages (other than English) in British TV holiday shows. Although most hosts/locals featured in the holiday programmes use English to communicate with the travelling journalists, regardless of the official status of English in their territories, it is not uncommon for the presenters to initiate interaction with the locals in their native language, to quote 'foreign' language …
Social roles and negotiation of status in host-tourist interaction: A view from British television holiday programmes
Although folk discourses frequently emphasise such raison d'être benefits of tourism as broadening one's horizons through knowing foreign people(s) and cultures, most critical studies of tourism stress tourists' relative illiteracy with regard to the 'reading' of the local. This paper is based on extracts from two British holiday programme series, BBC's Holiday 2000/1 and ITV's Wish You Were Here?, in which the presenters engage in some form of v…
Communicating a global reach: Inflight magazines as a globalizing genre in tourism
Like most multinational or international corporations, marketing for airlines hinges on careful strategies of differentiation and promotion; an increasingly important part of the way this is achieved is for airlines to position themselves as 'global' and to promise their passengers the kudos of being global citizens and travellers. It is in this way that globalization can be seen to be not about just economic reordering, but also strategic, comme…
Profiling "New" Communication Technologies In Adolescence
In an overview of some of the central issues concerning the impact and effects of new technology in adolescence, this article questions the reality of the "net generation" before considering the interplay of new and old technologies, the internet as both communication and lifestyle resource, and newer technologies like text messaging and webcams
Teenagers In Communication, Teenagers On Communication
With adolescents commonly depicted by adults as communication ignorant and inept, the need to find out what young people actually understand by, and know about, communication is discussed in this article. In this vein, two pieces of research that have investigated "communication awareness" in adolescence are reviewed, and ideas for further research in the area are offered
Relating to Our Work, Accounting for Our Selves: The Autobiographical Imperative in Teaching About Difference
The central thesis in this essay is the need to get more personal and more political in our thinking and especially our teaching about interculturality. Offering a 'radical' critique of the agenda of conventional Intercultural Communication scholarship, I draw my inspiration from the conceptual and philosophical roots of the field, while also proposing political and pedagogical routes for the future. In addition to ideas from feminist literary th…
“Half-Hearted Tokens of Transparent Love”? “Ethnic” Postcards and the Visual Mediation of Host–tourist Communication
One negotiation site of heavily mediated, indirect, and usually inadvertent communication between hosts and tourists is the picture postcard rack. As “hegemonically scripted discourses,” postcards make important assumptions about the tourist’s touristic experience, as well as the image of that experience she/he will want to communicate to others “back home.” Of more importance, however, are the assumptions being made in postcards about the people…
Symbolic Capitals: Visual Discourse and Intercultural Exchange in the European Capital of Culture Scheme
In multilingual Europe, visual discourse may function as a cross-culturally strategic form of communication, thanks in part to its perceptual and iconic availability. In this regard, we offer a social semiotic critique of a range of visual resources deployed in he official promotional texts of 30 of the 43 cities either nominated or competing for he title of European Capital of Culture between 2005 and 2011. In considering the political/cultural/…
The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: Symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes
From a sample of 51 major international airlines, we offer a critical discourse analysis of so-called loyalty or frequent-flyer programmes and their related business-class services. As examples of cultural capital par excellence, these seemingly innocuous discursive formations act as significant agents of, and channels for, globalist relations of power in the context of international travel and tourism. The principal logic of frequent-flyer progr…
From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media
As a way of tracking popular framing of CMC, this article critically reviews an international corpus of 101 print-media accounts (from 2001 to 2005) of language-use in technologies such as instant messaging and text messaging. From the combined perspective of folk linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this type of metadiscourse (i.e., discourse about discourse) reveals the conceptual and ideological assumptions by which particular communic…
The Other Closet: Atheists, Homosexuals and the Lateral Appropriation of Discursive Capital
Previous studies have considered different forms of economic and/or cultural appropriation between status-unequal groups, for example young, White, middle-class people cashing in on the music of urban, African-American culture. In this paper, however, we are interested in what we call ‘lateral appropriation’, the process whereby the discursive capital of one marginalized group is usurped by another similarly marginalized group. In particular, dra…
National pride, global capital: A social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry
In this article we examine 561 different airline tailfin designs as a visual genre, revealing how the global-local binary may be managed and realized semiotically. Our analysis is organized into three strands: (a) a descriptive analysis identifies the strikingly restricted visual lexicon and dominant corporate aesthetic established by tailfin design; (b) an interpretive analysis considers the communicative strategies at play and the meaning poten…
Others’ Voices: Why “Dispatches from the Street”
Against Technologization: Young People's New Media Discourse as Creative Cultural Practice
Educators, businesspeople, and journalists–all of them adults–seem very preoccupied nowadays with young people's supposed lack of "good" communication, leading to evaluation of their communication "skills" against standards of appropriateness and usefulness shaped by the needs of the market rather than everyday social and relational needs of communicators. This technologization of communication comes to a head in commentary (read: complaints) abo…
Digital DiscourseLanguage in the New Media
This book offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing technologies like instant messaging, text messaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts (journalism, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (pro…
Tracing Place, Locating Self: Embodiment and Remediation In/Of Tourist Spaces
Tourists’ encounters with/in places, while powerfully represented and organized by visual imagery, are also experienced through material exchange, social interaction and physical movement. We offer a visual ethnography of the embodied, re/mediating inter/actions of tourists in a range of different sites. Our images are organized into five compositional themes or narratives: (1) self-locational rituals and spectacles; (2) tactile engagements with …
Tourism discourse: Languages and banal globalization
Described as the "one of the greatest population movements of all time, " tourism is firmly established as one of the world's largest international trades.And it is not just people who are on tour; language too is on the move.In this paper we examine some of the ways that our research has shown language commonly being taken up in tourism's search for exoticity and authenticity.Specifically, we present a series of different touristic genres (broad…
Elite mobilities: The semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege
Tourism is immensely powerful in (re)organising large-scale inequalities and privileges. In the rapid expansion of 'luxury tourism' we find a wing of this truly global culture industry openly committed to the symbolic production of elite status, distinction and privilege. Our visual essay here offers a series of multimodal, multi-voiced statements arising from a research project that explores and critiques the lavish semiotic economies and strict…
Introduction: Sociolinguistics and tourism - mobilities, markets, multilingualism
In the introduction to this special issue on Sociolinguistics and Tourism, we focus on language in tourism as an important window into contemporary forms of economic, political, and social change. Our aim is twofold: (1) to establish and extend 'sociolinguistics and tourism' as another social and applied domain of sociolinguistic research; and (2) to use tourism as a lens for a broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of late modernity. To this…
Two hundred ninety-four: Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking
We offer here a multimodal discourse analysis of a range of verbal (writing and speech), nonverbal (movement and gesture) and technological (photography and video) resources used by tourists at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In doing so, we pin-point the recycling and layering of mediatized representations (e.g. guidebooks and official brochures), mediated actions (e.g. climbing the Tower or posing in front of it), and remediated practices (e.g. post…
Queering critical discourse studies or/and Performing ‘post-class’ ideologies
At the heart of this paper is a desire to queer critical discourse studies (CDS) a little: jabbing at our norms and wisdoms, poking around our spiritless or dispirited spaces, and perhaps nudging us towards some new possibilities. This impulse is prompted by my collaborative research on elitist discourse and so-called luxury tourism which also serve as the thematic focus of my paper here. Throughout this work, I have struggled to manage the affec…
Word-things and Thing-words: The Transmodal Production of Privilege and Status
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (22 works) · Linguistics (21 works) · Politics (20 works) · Aesthetics (16 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (16 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works)