Blog posts

Design is normative. When we try to make something invisible, we always also make choices about who this is for – and who not. So the question is of course: What now? I think a good and important first step is to learn more about the problematic sides of our field and to engage with the politics of design.

My PhD research investigates the language work of user experience (“UX”) writers. UX writers are contemporary language workers typically employed in web and software design, where they are responsible for designing the words that we see when we use websites, apps, and other software, and one thing that intrigues me about this profession is the question of job titles and labelling.

What does the ‘critical’ in critical sociolinguistics or critical discourse studies actually mean? Generally, ‘critical’ has three interrelated meanings. Critical in the sense of ‘being critical’ of traditional approaches: In this sense, critical research is wary of mainstream ideas based in tradition. Critical sociolinguistics, for instance, is critical of traditional approaches to language policy research.

‘Discourse’ means different things to different people. Scholars of discourse studies generally agree that the term has three main meanings: ‘Language above the sentence’, or, following Gee (2014), ‘d discourse’: This is about how we package what we say or write into discrete units and arrange these packages in, for instance, the flow of a conversation.

Realism and constructivism are two different epistemological positions, that is, two different ways of understanding how we know what we know. Realism = objects in the world have inherent properties that constrain observational accounts. Constructivism = the very ‘reality’ of objects is itself an outcome of discursive practices in relation to the object.