Academic staff

Modules taught

Undergraduate

• U75100 Understanding Communication
  We intuitively think of communication as essentially transmitting information—and we couldn't be more wrong. This module aims to introduce students to a social and semiotic view of communication that views it instead as the delicate coordination of human interaction: how do people know what to say (or write), and how to say it? How do they know when it is time to speak, or to be silent (or to text, or to tweet, or to post to their Instagram flow)? How do people create, through their communicative choices, different forms of social relations?
• U75125 Research Methods
  Research is not an obscure, arcane skill. Journalists, advertisers, government regulators, public relations specialists, information officers and a myriad other communication specialists face every day the need to compile and analyse reliable information, and to explain it in a useful manner. This module intends to help students learn how to plan, conduct and report original research for both academic and professional purposes.
• U75131 Design for Online Communication
  Communicating online requires not only the technical and creative skills to manipulate image and text, but also an understanding of how the behaviour of audiences changes in this specific social, cultural and technological context. This module intends to introduce students to the fundamental practical elements of web design, including HTML and CSS coding. No prior programming experience required.
• U75172 Special Topics
  Communication, media and cultural studies are fast-moving fields. This module introduces participants to an issue or topic of particular contemporary relevance at the time of teaching, drawing on the CMC staff research specialisms.
• U75183 Branded Communication
  We like in a world saturated by the pervasive influence of the persuasion industries —advertising, branding, public relations, etc. This module explores the techniques used by commercial and non-commercial organisations to build their image in the eyes of the public, developing at the same time a practical command of these skills and a critical reflction on the effects they have on contemporary culture and society.

I am also module leader for U75168 Independent Study, U75190 Interdisciplinary Dissertation and U75199 Dissertation.

Supervision

I am currently supervising the work of the following doctoral candidates:

• Edwina Kinsella — #Auctor. An alternative discourse to ‘architecture as a dependent discipline’
• Katerina Kosta — Sustainability reporting in higher education: the case of the UK
• Bazil Solomon — A novel theory of peer support constructs in social media discourse (advice seeking and advice giving with sentiment and stance-taking)

One of my main lines of research addresses questions of sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility reporting, environmentally-themed public relations and advertising, and greenwash.

A separate strand of research (in collaboration with Dr Kat Gupta, University of Roehampton) looks into the cultural construction of sexual norms and scripts, through the exploration of the fantasies and desires expressed in user-generated online erotica.

More broadly, I am interested in using critical discourse analysis to investigate shifts in social relations of production, especially the social impact of managerialism as an "expert system"; societal representations of labour; and the managerialisation of the self, personal life and the environment.

My research takes a Digital Humanities approach, using computer-aided methods to examine large datsets of text-based communication in order to model the social and cultural dynamics that motivate it.

Research group membership

Together with Dr Andrea Macrae, I convene OBLaDi, the Oxford Brookes Language & Discourse research group.

Journal articles

• Lischinsky A, 'Doing the naughty or having it done to you? Agent roles in erotic writing'
  Porn Studies 5 (2) (2017) pp.156-174
  ISSN: 2326-8743 eISSN: 2326-8751
  Abstract

  Frequent criticisms of pornography have argued that it reproduces hegemonic misogyny by emphasising representations of females as passive, powerless and submissive. Nevertheless, attempts to substantiate such claims have been scarce.  This paper seeks to provide empirical evidence on this question through an analysis of the representation of sexual activity in a large corpus of online pornographic stories. I employ corpus linguistic methods to examine the grammatical patterns used to attribute agency to male and female participants in sexual acts. The analysis shows these narratives tend to represent sexual intercourse as an asymmetric engagement between an agent and a patient, rather than as a joint collaborative activity. Although representations emphasising female agency are not rare, they are significantly less common than those assigning males the agent role, thus reinforcing rather than challenging dominant discourses of gender and sexuality.  Linguistic methods such as these have the potential for a more nuanced and finer-grained description than is often possible for visual materials, and can profitably add to our understanding of gender and genre differences in pornography.
  

  Keywords: written pornography; online pornography; corpus linguistics; corpus-aided discourse studies; corpus stylistics; transitivity; gender

  Website 
• Lischinsky A, 'What Is the Environment Doing in My Report? Analyzing the Environment-as-Stakeholder Thesis through Corpus Linguistics'
  Environmental Communication 9 (4) (2015) pp.539-559
  ISSN: 1752-4032 eISSN: 1752-4040
  Abstract

  This paper seeks to explore whether business organizations' claims to regard the natural environment as a stakeholder are consistent with the way in which the environment is represented in their corporate social responsibility reporting. It applies corpus linguistic methods to analyze statistical regularities and differences in the discursive construction of core stakeholders, such as customers and employees, and that of the natural environment. Results show that the representation of the environment is not characterized by the agency and capacity for engagement that characterizes other stakeholders. While organizations overtly acknowledge a duty toward the environment, the dominant lexical and grammatical patterns in which it is represented tend to obscure the organization's responsibilities and emphasize its mitigating actions instead. Although the argument for regarding the environment as a stakeholder is based on the fact that it places objective and compelling demands on our actions, we look in vain for recognition of such demands in organizational reporting.

   

  Website 

Book chapters

• Lischinsky A, 'Overlooked text types: From fictional texts to real-world discourses' in Taylor C, Marchi A (ed.), Corpus Approaches To Discourse: A critical review, Routledge (2018)
  ISBN: 9781138895782
  Abstract

  This chapter discusses the difficulties involved in determining representativeness in language data, and illustrates the issues raised by the bias of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) towards particular genres – typically official, public and factual ones. It also discusses how fiction and imagination are central to understanding of the real world and sketches some of the complex ways in which readers' affect and attention are engaged by imaginative discourses. The chapter addresses disciplinary divides about fiction and outlines some of the particular interpretive caveats required to deal with such materials. It offers an example of how these limitations can be addressed by exploring the role of erotic fiction in the circulation of discourses about gender and sexuality. Instead of 'considering the whole network of genres to understand the functioning' of a specific discourse domain, much CADS work is limited to snapshots of particularly salient junctures. Fragmentation has been observed in factual genres such as news and advertising, as well as literature.
  

  Website 
• Lischinsky A, 'Critical Discourse Studies and Branding' in Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis, Routledge (2018)
  ISBN: 978-1138826403
  

Membership of professional bodies

I am one of the founding editors of the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies. I also sit on the editorial board of Critical Discourse Studies and the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics, and act as book review editor for Discourse & Society.

Conferences

Conferences

• Lischinsky, A. (2015) ‘Modelling interpersonal dimensions in presidential discourse’. Paper presented to the iMean 4 Conference, Warwick
• Lischinsky, A. (2015) ‘Doing the naughty or having it done to you: agent roles in erotic writing’. Paper presented to the Corpus Linguistics 2015 Conference, Lancaster
• Lischinsky, A. (2014) ‘Modelling Argentine presidential discourse (2007–2014): a computational approach’. Paper presented to the CADAAD’14 Conference, Budapest
• Lischinsky, A. and Egan Sjölander, A. (2013) ‘Corporate voices in the public sphere: PR and the environment’. Paper presented to the 2013 Conference on Communication and Environment, Uppsala
• Lischinsky, A. (2013) ‘What’s the environment doing in my report?’. Paper presented to the Corpus Linguistics 2013 Conference, Lancaster
• Lischinsky, A. (2012) ‘Misinformed participation: corporate greenwash and the exclusion of consumers from environmental decision-making’. Paper presented to the 2nd ISA Forum, Buenos Aires
• Lischinsky, A. (2012) ‘Framing analysis across the disciplines? (critical) discourse studies in interdisciplinary research projects’. Paper presented to the CADAAD’12 Conference, Braga
• Lischinsky, A. (2011) ‘‘We believe we are a constructive partner in society’: A corpus perspective on the discursive construction of a corporate self in annual reports’. Paper presented to the Rhetoric in Society III Conference, Antwerp
• Lischinsky, A. (2010) ‘‘Our business acumen has proved to be invaluable in times of crisis’: A corpus perspective on the discursive construction of critical events in annual reports’. Paper presented to the 9th International Conference on Organizational Discourse, Amsterdam
• Lischinsky, A. (2010) ‘The struggle over sustainability: a corpus approach to managerial conceptions of sustainable development’. Paper presented to the CADAAD’10 Conference “Ideology, identity and interaction”, Łódź
• Lischinsky, A. (2010) ‘The business conception of sustainable development: a view from corpus linguistics’. Paper presented to the IAMCR 2010 Conference “Communication and citizenship”, Braga
• Lischinsky, A. (2009) ‘The narrative construction of managerial expertise. Storytelling in popular management books’. Paper presented to the International Conference on Narrative, Birmingham
• Lischinsky, A. (2009) ‘Talking like you mean business. Metadiscourse in popular books on management’. Paper presented to the XXVII AESLA International Conference, Ciudad Real, Spain
• Coromines, D., Lischinsky, A. and Valls, M. (2009) ‘La redacció del Treball de Fi de Grau: Proposta didàctica per superar les mancances de la competència escrita acadèmica dels estudiants’ [Writing final year projects: a pedagogic proposal to improve the teaching of academic writing]. Paper presented to the Jornades de Docència 2009, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
• Lischinsky, A. (2008) ‘Titling practices in popular management books’. Paper presented to the Interpersonality in Written Academic Discourse Conference: Perspective across Languages and Cultures, Jaca, Spain
• Lischinsky, A. (2008) ‘Lo que el dinero no puede comprar. Higiene verbal en la recepción de la jerga gerencial’ [What money can’t buy: verbal hygiene in the public understanding of managerial jargon]. Paper presented to the XII Jornadas Nacionales de Investigadores en Comunicación, Rosario, Argentina
• Lischinsky, A. (2008) ‘At the crossroads of language, class and culture: Responses to managerial jargon in Spanish’. Paper presented to the 4th International Conference of Hispanic Linguistics & 2nd Biennial Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Spanish in Society “Spanish at work”, Swansea
• Lischinsky, A. and Antonini, C. (2008) ‘Dollars are green too. A discourse-based approach to the analysis of corporate social responsibility reports’. Paper presented to the II European Communication Conference “Communication Policies and Culture in Europe”, Barcelona
• Lischinsky, A. (2007) ‘“Show, don’t tell”. Racism in the visual depiction of the other in high school textbooks’. Paper presented to the II Language Ideologies and Media Discourse Conference, Leeds
• Lischinsky, A. (2007) ‘Examples as persuasive communication in popular management literature’. Paper presented to the XIV Susanne Hübner International Seminar, Zaragoza

Further information

For up-to-date versions of my publications, please visit my Academia.edu profile or my Google Citations page.

Further information

I tweet at @alischinsky