From covidiots to vaxxies: How our pandemic language changed over a year
March 19, 2021
When the pandemic started in early 2020, I began to record some of the changes in our language that this global upheaval brought with it. The language of war was everywhere, a type of language that we are quite used to from other health emergencies. But a new language also began to emerge. We started …
Naming without shaming: A virus communication conundrum
February 19, 2021
We have all heard about the Kent strain of the coronavirus, or the UK or English strain for that matter, or the South African strain, or the Brazilian strain, not to forget the despicable references to the China or Wuhan virus by a former president of the United States. It’s good that we know about …
CfP: Covid-19 and metaphors special issue
June 3, 2020
Call for contributions to Special Issue of Metaphor and Symbol on: Framing Covid-19: Assessing the Socio-cultural Imagery of the 2020 Corona Pandemic Guest-editors: Martin Döring (University of Hamburg, Germany) Brigitte Nerlich (University of Nottingham, United Kingdom) Context: The global Covid-19 pandemic has led to an explosion of metaphors and symbols. Research tracing and examining this …
A different kind of language in times of coronavirus
April 9, 2020
This is just a quick note on the language used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak in his speech on 8 April, 2020 on economic support for the charity sector, at the daily press conference at Downing Street. It starts with the well-rehearsed statements to which we have all become accustomed. It wishes …
Why we should care about the language we use in science
December 7, 2018
This post first appeared in the ‘On Society’ blog at BioMed Central and is reposted here with permission. *** Brigitte Nerlich and Carmen McLeod at the Synthetic Biology Research Centre at the University of Nottingham have given ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ a new twist, by focusing on responsible language use. As everybody knows by now, words matter in politics as …
Promises, promises, promises
December 28, 2017
It all started with this tweet – a conversation between Oliver Morton, Jack Stilgoe and David Keith about the hopes and fears related to geoengineering. In this conversation, they stumbled against the words ‘promise’ and ‘promising’, with Oliver and Keith interpreting them in terms of ordinary language use, while Jack interpreted them also in terms …
AMR and the ‘rhetoric of resistance’
September 21, 2016
Today Helen Lambert, the ESRC‘s AMR champion, posted a blog post under the title ‘Rhetoric of resistance‘ on the AMR Social Science Champion Blog ahead of the UN General Assembly meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance (UNGA) meeting about which she also tweeted during the day. “The primary objective of the meeting is to summon and maintain strong …
Musings on language and life, with special reference to ‘programming’
April 1, 2016
This morning I opened the newspaper and read an article about a new language that lets researchers design novel biological circuits. I mumbled something about this over coffee and my husband said, oh but wasn’t that old hat, we all knew that DNA was a language, code etc. So what was new? I looked again …
Paddling in the shallow end of knowledge
October 10, 2014
This post was prompted by two things. I, a social scientist of sorts, recently tried to read two books, Smashing Physics by Jon Butterworth and Synthetic Biology: A Primer by Paul Freemont and Richard Kitney. I also listened in to some conversations where people spoke about how problematic they find it to understand social science …
Are they really climate deniers? Closing down debate in science and politics.
March 9, 2013
Just had an interesting back and forth with Vanessa Heggie about ‘what to call climate deniers/sceptics’? At the bottom of her excellent post on ‘how to debate with sceptics’, Vanessa wonders whether ‘denier‘ or ‘sceptic‘ is the right word to use around climate change. This was a handy reminder that, although I read stuff on …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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