Language & Power Podcast
Why language and power?
Language is crucial to understanding societies. It’s crucial to recognising the ecological, social, political, and economic conditions in which we live. We use language to frame problems, formulate solutions, negotiate, and communicate political and economic pitfalls.
Language is interaction that can accelerate action. But language is also performance, and performances can be used to distract from inaction, to avoid action, or postpone it, as much as to accelerate it.
And language is what we focus on in this second series of the language and power podcast.
Michael Farrelly
Having been a Senior Lecturer in English Language, and researcher in UK universities for 20 years, I am now an independent academic. My research uses critical discourse analysis and focuses on the language of politics, policy and social and environmental justice. As well as being co-host of the Language & Power podcast, I run the Discourse Academy and the Strategic Language Awareness consultancy.
Tom Bartlett
Is interested in language as a social phenomenon, from the functional description of structure to linguistic ethnography and critical analysis. He specialises in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), with a particular focus on functional descriptions of Scottish Gaelic at one end of the scale and the Discourses of Sustainability and Community Management at the other.