research and writing: projects
discourse, elitism and class inequality
Arising from my work on global tourism (see below), the latest direction in my research examines the discursive production of elitism and social privilege. The focus of this work at the moment is on the cultural production of class inequality in the context of super-elite tourism. In 2006, I was awarded a $25,000 grant from the UW's Royalty Research Fund grant for my project "Global Mobilities: Super-Elite Travel and the Discursive Production of Luxury, Privilege and Class Inequality". In 2007/08, I was also awarded a Society of Scholars fellowship from the UW's Simpson Center for the Humanities which has enabled me to make progress on this project which I am undertaking with my colleague Professor Adam Jaworski (Cardiff University). Three initial or programmatic publications in this area are:
Thurlow, C. & Jaworski, A. (2006). The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: Symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes. Discourse & Society, 17(1), 131-167.
Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2009). Talking an elitist stance: Ideology and the discursive production of social distinction. In A. Jaffee (ed.), Perspectives on Stance. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thurlow, C. & Jaworski, A. (2009). Silence is golden: Elitism, linguascaping and ‘anti-communication’ in luxury tourism. In A. Jaworski & C. Thurlow (eds), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum.
discourse, tourism and globalization
Since 2001, I have been working with a team of colleagues at Cardiff University on a $2-million research program on Language and Global Communication. Within this broader program, my work has focused specifically on a project Language, Communication and Tourism as a Global Cultural Industry. This long-term research project is now culminating in two book-length monographs currently in preparation:
Thurlow, C. & Jaworski, A. (due 2009). Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C., Ylänne-McEwen, V. & Lawson, S. (in prep for 2009/10). Language, Tourism and Globalization: The Sociolinguistics of Fleeting Relationships. London: Routledge.
Related to this work is a broader concern to explore the ways language and communication are currently being 'reworked' in the context of so called globalization. I am increasingly interested in examining how visual discourse in particular is being globalized, as in these forthcoming publications completed with my graduate colleague Giorgia Aiello here at the University of Washington:
Thurlow, C. & Aiello, G. (2007). National pride, global capital: A social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry. Visual Communication, 6(3), 305-344.
Aiello, G. & Thurlow, C. (2006). Symbolic capitals: Visual discourse and intercutural exchange in the European Capital of Culture scheme. Language and Intercultural Communication, 6(2), 148-162.
discourse, young people and new media
My other main area of research activity arises from my concern to challenge adult discourse about young people and especially their supposed communication ineptitude or ignorance. While spending some of my time questioning the way adults view young people as communicators, I am also interested in the way young people see themselves in this regard, examining what I call their 'communication awareness'. With a grant from the UK's Nuffield Foundation, for example, a piece arising from this work is this:
Thurlow, C. & Marwick, A. (2005). Apprehension versus awareness: Toward more critical understandings of young people’s communication experiences. In Williams, A. & Thurlow, C. (eds), Talking adolescence: Perspectives on communication in the teenage years (pp. 53-72). New York: Peter Lang.
A specific focus of my work in this area has been to question adult misrepresentations of young people's use of technologically-mediated language. In addition to a sister publication in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (see publications), a recent project has been written up in this forthcoming chapter:
Thurlow, C. & Poff, M. (2009). The language of text-messaging. In S. C. Herring, D. Stein & T. Virtanen (eds), Handbook of the Pragmatics of CMC. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Thurlow, C. (2006). From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 11(3). Available online