Research Overview

I am currently the Senior Research Associate for the project ‘Public Discourses of Dementia: Challenging stigma and promoting personhood’, which is led by Dr Gavin Brookes. This project examines linguistic and visual representations of dementia across a range of contexts, combining corpus and multimodal approaches to discourse. My current role builds upon my doctoral research at the University of Nottingham (completed in May 2022), which used focus groups and interviews to explore how people affected by dementia might situate themselves in relation to different dementia discourses, both in conversation and when responding to visual and linguistic examples of dementia representations. I am currently building on this work with an open-access book, entitled Navigating Dementia and Society: Exploring how people affected by dementia negotiate and reshape popular discourses (this is due to be published by Bloomsbury at the end of 2025).

My main research interests are health communication, dementia, ageing, the environment, multimodality and mixed methods approaches. I am especially interested in how lived experience might intersect with professional and public discourses for dementia, and in the role of both language and images in communicating about this topic.

I am the current Convenor for the British Association of Applied Linguists' (BAAL) Health & Science Communication Special Interest Group. I am also part of the Lancaster University organising committee for the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care (IC4CH). IC4CH aims to conduct evidence-based research to improve understandings of the role of communication in a wide range of healthcare contexts.

I have experience of lecturing at masters and undergraduate level at Lancaster University (Corpus Linguistics LING421 and LING103 Linguistics respectively). Previously, I also taught on an undergraduate module, 'Language and Linguistics' (University of Nottingham, 2019-2020) and worked as a Research Assistant and Teaching Affiliate for Linguistic Profiling for Professionals (2017-18). I co-led the Nottingham Health Humanities Early Bird Researcher group, helped coordinate a peer mentoring programme for researchers (Adapt Together, University of Nottingham) and was the Production Editor for the postgraduate-led Journal of Languages, Texts, and Society (Issue 4).