Mariana Achugar is a Guggenheim fellow and works at the Facultad de Información y Comunicación of the Universidad de la República, Uruguay. Her work integrates Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis with ethnographic methods. She examines how meanings are made through semiotic practices in situational and cultural contexts as a way to understand the beliefs and worldview of participants. Her critical approach to these topics targets discursive processes by which certain meanings relate to power differences that in turn produce social differences. These discursive processes are explored at different scales from the face-to-face interaction level to the institutional discourse level. They integrate descriptions of discrete instantiations of meaning making processes such as texts or interactions, with explanations of how these instances unfold in time as part of cultural practices within larger historical processes. Her recent projects have focused on teaching and learning history in the foreign language classroom, disciplinary literacy in history, and intergenerational transmission of the recent past.
Selected recent publications:
- Oteíza, T. & Achugar, M. (2018) History textbooks and the construction of dictatorship. In Eckhardt, F. & Bock, A. (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies, Chapter 25. ISBN 978-1-137-53142-1.
- Achugar M. (2017) Critical Discourse Analysis and History. In: Flowerdew J and Richardson J (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 298–311.
- Achugar, M. & Carpenter, B. (2017) Critical SFL Praxis Principles in English Language Arts Education: Engaging Pre-service Teachers in Reflective Practice. In Harman, R. (ed.) Bilingual Learners and Social Equity:Critical Approaches to Systemic Functional Linguistics, pp. 91-108. London: Springer
- Achugar, M. & Schleppegrell, M. (2016) Reflection literacy and the teaching of history. In Bowcher, W. & Liang, J. (eds.) Society in Language, Language in Society: Essays in Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan, pp. 357-378. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Discursive processes of intergenerational transmission of recent history:(Re)Making our past, Language and Linguistics Series, New York: Palgrave (2016).
- Special Issue of Linguistics & Education. Critical Language Awareness Approaches in the Americas: Theoretical principles, pedagogical practices and distribution of intellectual labor. Linguistics & Education(2015) 32A.
Gunther Kress is Professor of Semiotics and Education at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. His research is in communication and meaning-making in contemporary environments. His broad aims are to continue developing a social semiotic theory of multimodal communication; and, in that, to develop a theory in which communication, learning, identity are entirely interconnected. One part of that agenda is to develop apt tools for the ‘recognition’ and ‘valuation’ of learning.
He has led and contributed to a wide range of research on multimodal interaction and environments, including the gains and losses of changes in representation, knowledge and pedagogy, the English and Science classroom, and more recently the surgical operating theatre.
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he is also Deputy Director of the LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focusing on English and Tagálog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics, forensic linguistics and social semiotics.
Recent publications include a collection of interviews with Wang Zhenhua (Interviews with J R Martin Foreign Language and Research Press, Beijing 2015); a book on teaching academic discourse on-line (Genre Pedagogy in Higher Education, Palgrave Macmillan 2016), with Shoshana Dreyfus, Sally Humphrey and Ahmar Mahboob; and a book on Youth Justice Conferencing (Discourse and Diversionary Justice, Palgrave Macmillan 2018), with Michele Zappavigna.
Eight volumes of his collected papers (edited by Wang Zhenhua, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press) have been published in China (2010, 2012).
Professor Martin was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998, and was Head of its Linguistics Section from 2010-2012; he was awarded a Centenary Medal for his services to Linguistics and Philology in 2003. In April 2014 Shanghai Jiao Tong University opened its Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics, appointing Professor Martin as Director.
A book reviewing Martin’s contributions to systemic functional linguistics has recently been published by Peking University Press:
Zhu, Y S & Z H Wang [Eds.] 2013 On J R Martin’s Contribution to Systemic Functional Linguistics. Beijing: Peking University Press. 209pp.
A play imagining a debate between Martin and Quintilian, holder of the first Roman Chair of Rhetoric, about the analysis of the summary recount at the end of Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom has recently appeared (cf. Martin 1999 ‘Grace: the logogenesis of freedom’ below):
McCormack, R 2014 Reading Mandela: genre pedagogy vs Ancient Rhetoric. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 9.2. 177-200.
Srikant Sarangi is Professor in Humanities and Medicine and Director of the Danish Institute of Humanities and Medicine (DIHM) at Aalborg University, Denmark. Between 1993 and 2013, he was Professor in Language and Communication and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University (UK), where he continues as Honorary Professor. Currently he is also Adjunct Professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim (Norway), Visiting Professor at University of Jyväskylä (Finland) and Visiting Professor at the College of Medicine, Qatar University. Between 2013 and 2016, he was Visiting Research Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, and since 2013 he has been Visiting Professor under the Academic Icon scheme at University of Malay. Over the last twenty years, he has held visiting academic attachments in many parts of the world.
In 2012, he was awarded the title of ‘Fellow’ by the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. In 2015, he was elected as a ‘Foreign Member’ of The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters (Societas Scientiarum Fennica).
His research interests include: institutional and professional discourse from an applied linguistics perspective (e.g., health, social welfare, bureaucracy, education etc.); communication in genetic counselling, HIV/AIDS, telemedicine, primary care and palliative care; communication ethics; teaching and assessment of consulting and communication skills; language and identity in public life; intercultural pragmatics. He has held several project grants to study various aspects of health communication.
He is author and editor of twelve books, guest-editor of eight journal special issues and has published more than 250 book chapters and journal articles in leading journals. In addition, he has presented more than 1000 papers (including plenaries, keynotes, masterclasses and workshops) at international conferences and other forums.
He is the editor of TEXT & TALK: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies (formerly TEXT) as well as founding editor of both Communication & Medicine and Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (formerly Journal of Applied Linguistics). He is also general editor of the book series Studies in Communication in Organisations and Professions (SCOPE). He serves as an editorial board member for other journals and book series[es], and as a consulting advisor at many national and international levels.
