ABOUT ME

I am a sociolinguist, currently working as a research associate at Aston University. I previously completed my PhD in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. My main research interests include: gender and language, sports media, new media, multimodality, health communication, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and conversation analysis. Below is a summary of my recent projects:

Gender representations of tennis players in the new media

In my PhD project I examine how female and male tennis players are represented in online news and social media by five groups of social actors: tournament organizer, tennis organization, sports news media, tennis players and spectators/public. In studying meaning-making by both text and image, I adopt a corpus-assisted critical discourse analytical approach, and draw on Kress & van Leeuwen (2006)'s visual grammar and van Leeuwen (2008)'s social actor theory. My goal is to demonstrate the importance of attending to the specificities of the new media and provide a more comprehensive sketch of gender representations through giving voice to the under-examined participants in the constantly evolving mediascape.

Physiotherapist-patient interaction during exercise training in Hong Kong

I have been working under the supervision of Dr Veronika Schoeb to examine physiotherapist-patient interaction from a conversation analytic perspective since 2015. In this project we take a multimodal approach to examine how physiotherapist instructs exercise and how patient participates in the communicative event.

COVID-19 Meme in Chinese online community

(Co-investigator: Songyan Du)

In the Chinese context, netizens frequently use memes on social media or other virtual platforms to voice their perspectives. In this project, we study the use of memes about COVID-19 on Zhihu, a socialized question-and-answer website in China that establishes a space for knowledge sharing. We provide a social semiotic account of how memes communicate attitudinal judgement.