The next webinar in the Edge Hill University Linguistics Research Group Speaker Series will take place on Thursday 26th March, 2-3pm (online via Teams).

Title: Media Representations of Blindness in UK Newspapers: A Corpus-Based Study

Speakers: Dr Costas Gabrielatos (English and Creative Arts), Dr Valeria Occelli (Psychology)

Abstract: In this talk, we present a study investigating how UK newspapers portray blindness and blind people and how media discourse may influence public representations of visual impairment. We compiled the Blindness UK Press Corpus, consisting of articles published between 2014 and 2023 across ten national UK newspapers. Using collocation analysis of the lemmas blind and blindness, semantic preference analysis, and discourse prosody analysis based on manual annotation, we examined references to individuals and to the condition. Results show that blind individuals are rarely granted agency or voice. References to blindness are largely metaphorical and predominantly negative, and discussions of the condition focus mainly on pathology and limitation.

Click here to register: https://forms.gle/s9Um9RR5xGzqeqca6.

Registration will close at 5pm on Wednesday 25th March. The teams link will be sent out on the morning of the 26th March.

If you have any questions, please email Dr Imogen Marcus: marcusi@edgehill.ac.uk.