Dept of Communication
University of Washington
Box 353740
Seattle WA 98195
USA
thurlow@u.washington.edu
Tel.
+1-206-543 2747
Dr Crispin Thurlow
Associate Professor, Communication
Adjunct Associate Professor, Linguistics
Framed as Discourse and Difference, my primary research agenda is to examine the ways people use language and other semiotic modes to negotiate and make sense of boundaries of difference in everyday social interaction. In all my work I am committed to understanding how identities of privilege, relations of power and ideologies of inequality are sustained communicatively; this may be achieved through face-to-face contact, in the contexts of 'new' technology, or through mediatized representations.
Identity is always a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative. (Stuart Hall)*
.. difference is the motor that produces texts. ... Where there is no difference, no text comes into being. (Gunther Kress)**
My work is theoretically and methodologically framed by two contemporary approaches in communication scholarship: Critical Discourse Studies and Critical Intercultural Studies (see Thurlow, 2009). These approaches together embrace more problematized and broadly conceived views of culture and cultural identity, and acknowledge the central role of language and communication in constituting social realities. In keeping with their critical character, both also demand a focus on ideology and power, and the interplay between micro-level social processes and macro-level social structures.
For the most part, I am specifically interested in sites of social difference/inequality which are less commonly investigated in mainstream communication scholarship. In practice, this means that my research focuses on three principal domains of social life:
- adolescence and age-related boundaries;
- tourism and national/ethnic/class boundaries;
- sex/uality and gender boundaries.
Since they are such key contexts for much contemporary social interaction, I am always interested in the role of 'new' communication technologies in each of these domains, but especially in the context of adolescence.
background
I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington where I also have an adjunct appointment in the Department of Linguistics. I came to the UW in 2003 after three years as an assistant professor in the Centre for Language & Communication Research at Cardiff University (Wales) where I still hold the honorary position of Associate Research Fellow.
My background is originally in social and applied psychology from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa (1985-1990) and I am a registered (or 'certified') psychologist with the British Psychological Society. I have a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and Marketing, an Honours degree in Clinical Psychology and a Masters degree in Educational Psychology.
I also have a background in the theatre, having trained for two years as an actor at The Poor School in London (1990-1992) and, before that, having qualified as a teacher of Speech & Drama through Trinity College London (1985-1989).
After several years of travelling and working at various jobs in London (including the British Council), I returned to academia, completing another masters degree - in Communication Studies at Sheffield Hallam University in England (1995-1996) - followed by a research diploma in Language & Communication Research and then my doctorate at Cardiff University in Wales (1997-2001).
* Hall, Stuart. (1997). The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity. In Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (pp. 20-39). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.** Kress, Gunther. (1985). Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice. Geelong: Deakin University Press. (p. 12)