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 and
Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (UW Bothell)
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)**
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.
My work is 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.
The concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that humans are animals suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (Clifford Geertz)***
For the most part, I am interested in sites of social difference/ inequality which are less commonly investigated in conventional communication scholarship. Specifically, my research is organized around two main topics representing two different domains of contemporary social life:
- young people, new media and age-related boundaries;
- tourism, global mobility and national/ethnic/class boundaries;
academic background
I am currently an Associate Professor based in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington where I also have an adjunct appointment in the Department of Linguistics and in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (UW Bothell). 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 methods diploma and then my doctorate in Language and Communication at Cardiff University, 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)
*** Geertz, Clifford. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. (p. 5)