Plenary Speakers

Prof Rodney Jones

Tribal epistemologies and the social construction of COVID-19 related knowledge

Prof Rodney Jones explores how people’s knowledge about health issues and choices about health behaviours are often based on affiliation and allegiance to the social, cultural or political ‘tribe’ to which they belong.

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Prof Rodney Jones is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Reading. He is author of Health and Risk Communication: A applied linguistic perspective (Routledge, 2013) and editor of the recently published collection Viral Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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You can watch his plenary talk here.

Dr Andrew Kehoe and Dr Robert Lawson

TRAC:COVID – Trust and communication: A Coronavirus online visual dashboard

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Dr Andrew Kehoe and Dr Robert Lawson present the findings of the AHRC-funded TRAC:COVID project carried out at Birmingham City University. They describe their corpus of 84 million UK tweets and open-access dashboard (https://www.traccovid.com/) which allow researchers, policy makers and the general public to visualise patterns in language use over the course of the COVID19 pandemic. They demonstrate the utility of the dashboard using two case studies conducted by the project team.

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Dr Andrew Kehoe is Associate Professor in Corpus Linguistics and Director of Research in English at Birmingham City University, with research interests in the language of online discourse. He was Principal Investigator on the TRAC:COVID project.

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Dr Robert Lawson is Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics at Birmingham City University, with research specialisms including language and gender and language in the media. He was Co-Investigator on the TRAC:COVID project.

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You can watch their plenary talk here.