We are delighted to announce the following keynote speakers:
Anita Fetzer is Professor of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Augsburg. Her research encompasses pragmatics, discourse analysis and discourse grammar. She has made contributions on theories of context and evidentiality, she has analysed pragmatic markers and discourse relations, and explored political discourse, intercultural discourse and media discourse. Recently, her focus has been on mediated political discourse (see e.g. Fetzer, Weizman & Berlin eds., The Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and Functions of Follow-Ups, John Benjamins, 2015). Anita Fetzer serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, and she is the editor of Pragmatics and Beyond New Series (John Benjamins).
Tuomo Hiippala is Assistant Professor of English Language and Digital Humanities (tenure track) in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. He is also a member of the Digital Geography Lab and affiliated with the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Studies as well as the Helsinki Institute of Urban and Regional Studies. Hiippala’s research develops linguistically-informed theories of multimodality and computer-assisted methods for its empirical study. He applies these theories in an ongoing collaboration with geographers, which applies natural language processing, computer vision and machine learning to the automatic content analysis of social media in order to better understand people and places in cities. His current projects include, for instance, Mapping the linguistic landscape of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. This project seeks to describe the languages used in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area and how the language users move about using official register and social media data.
Sirpa Leppänen is Professor of English in the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä. Her research areas include sociolinguistics, discourse studies, multilingualism, multimodality and intersectionality. She has studied youth language, fan fiction, uses of English in Finland, and more recently, social media. She is the author of numerous publications on social media, including Authenticity, Normativity and Social Media (Leppänen, Møller & Nørreby, eds, Special issue of Discourse, Context and Media, 2015) and Social Media Discourse, (Dis)identifications and Diversities (Leppänen, Westinen & Kytölä eds., Routledge, 2017).
Julien Longhi is Professor of Linguistics at the University Cergy-Pontoise in Paris. He specializes in discourse analysis of political and media texts, with a particular focus on ideologies, social media and digital humanities. He has published books, articles and edited volumes in the fields of pragmatics, semantics and corpus linguistics, in addition to discourse analysis. Julien Longhi is currently working on two major projects: one investigating ideology detection and characterization in Twitter and the other looking at risk and security discourses in collaboration with security authorities. Overall, Longhi invests a lot of resources to the societal impact of his scientific work. In addition to collaborating with authorities, he has opened a platform http://ideo2017.ensea.fr/plateforme/ in which members of the public can analyse politicians’ tweets. He is also an active commentator of current political matters in French journalistic media and on his blogs.
Ruth Page is Senior Lecturer in Stylistics in The Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests focus on narrative analysis, computer-mediated communication and language and gender. Her research includes both literary-critical and discourse analytic approaches to narrative, exploring storytelling examples found in literary, conversational, and most recently, social media contexts. She is the author of the monographs Stories and Social Media (Routledge, 2012), Researching the Language of Social Media (Routledge, 2014) and Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Her latest publications explore group selfies in Snapchat and self-denigration in Instagram.