Resources

A Brief History of Emoji from OpenLearn at the OU.

Where exactly did emoji come from? And how are they changing the way we communicate?

Can emojis play a part in debates about our national identity?, The New European, 9 March

The whimsical world of emoji swearing, Strong Language, 14 March

How emoji are changing the shape of everyday English

Fake news

Fake news: the solution is education, not regulation
Times Higher Education, 29 December 2016

At a time when universities are struggling to justify their position, Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg argue that the heightened need for critical literacy skills in tackling fake news and media manipulation highlights the central role that higher education can play for society as a whole.

The role of information literacy in the fight against fake news
Information Literacy Group Blog, 15 February 2018

A blog post by Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg on the particular expertise that higher education can bring to collaborative initiatives in the fight against fake news.

Social media: fake news, filter bubbles and sharing wisely

Three instructive animations designed to help students grapple with the fundamentals of social media communication to develop understanding of their online practices.

Parliamentary select committee inquiry into fake news

CREET researchers Caroline Tagg and Philip Seargeant are invited to present oral evidence based on their social media research to the committee, 23 January 2018.

Video: What sexism in call centres can tell us about sexism in society

This video reports on a sociolinguistic project undertaken in two call centres in Scotland and Denmark. The project compared the linguistic practices of male and female call centre agents and found that female call centre agents in both countries were more rule-compliant. In other words, they greeted the customer in the correct way, used the customer’s name, thanked the customer for calling and created rapport, as prescribed by the call centre management, to a greater extent than their male colleagues. In the video, the researcher, Dr. Anna Kristina Hultgren, offers a possible explanation for these findings and ponders the implications for call centre recruitment practices and gender inequality more widely. The research has been published in Language in Society and a popular version can be read in The Conversation.

Plenary: EMI in Higher Education: Implications for EAP

This opening plenary was given by Dr. Anna Kristina Hultgren at the BALEAP Professional Interest Meeting at the University of Southampton on the theme: EMI in Higher Education: the challenges and the opportunities. In her plenary, Dr. Hultgren stressed that EMI should not be regarded as a ‘threat’ to EAP practitioners, but, on the contrary, should be seen as an opportunity for collaboration between subject and language teachers, between EMI and EAP communities and between EAP decision makers, practitioners and researchers. She also argued that EAP has the knowledge base for successful EMI implementation and that coupled with the continued growth of EMI ‘there will be a lot more – not less – for EAP to do!’ See a review by Gary Riley-Jones of the plenary (pdf).

Plenary: EMI and multilingualism in non-English-dominant universities: reflecting on symptoms and root causes

This keynote was delivered by Dr. Anna Kristina Hultgren at the ESRC-funded seminar series ESRC Seminar series The Multilingual University: The impact of linguistic diversity in higher education in English-dominant and EMI contexts. In her plenary, Dr. Hultgren criticised the panglossian orthodoxy of much current socio- and applied, pointing out the irony that despite the rise in both linguistic diversity and English as a global language being attributable to the same underlying politico-economic policies, the former is hailed by socio- and applied linguists as a good thing and the latter as a bad thing. Dr. Hultgren called for linguists to more diligently engage with the political economy to uncover underlying causes of linguistic changes and enable the field to move beyond naïve venerations of multilingualism.

The EDiCT Manual

The EDiCT Manual applies contemporary empathy research to real world conflict situations. It offers ideas for practitioners in conflict transformation, and for anyone dealing with conflict in everyday life. Illustrated by case studies from Kenya and Nepal, the EDiCT Manual explains current thinking about empathy as a process of understanding another person, and how empathy is stopped when people come into conflict. It offers an approach for re-growing empathy as individuals and communities come out of conflict, and strategies for supporting this.

The EDiCT project is a collaboration between Professor Lynne Cameron at The Open University and the Birmingham-based NGO Responding to Conflict, Director Simon Weatherbed. It was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Empathy Dynamics in Conflict Transformation (EDiCT) is a knowledge exchange project designed to bring academic research into dialogue with conflict transformation experts and practitioners. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and connected to the Global Uncertainties programme.

EDiCT follows on from "Living with Uncertainty: Metaphor and the dynamics of empathy”, a project carried out as part of the Global Uncertainties Research Fellowship awarded to Professor Lynne Cameron at The Open University. Its goal is to apply the findings of the earlier project to the practice of conflict transformation through collaboration with practitioners.