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Thurlow, Crispin
http://faculty.washington.edu/thurlow/
Blog: http://www.i-needle.net/
Ph.D, Language & Communication, University of Wales (Cardiff)
Office: CMU 223
E-Mail: thurlow@uw.edu
Crispin Thurlow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and adjunct professor in the Department of Linguistics and in Interdisciplinary Arts & Science (UW Bothell). He also holds the honorary position of Associate Research Fellow in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University (Wales, UK).
Professor Thurlow’s research agenda focuses on “Discourse and Difference,” which he defines as the representation and organization of social inequality and cultural diversity in everyday linguistic and visual communication. His research is rooted theoretically in Critical Discourse Studies and Critical Intercultural Communication; as such, he is committed to understanding how relations of power, identities of privilege and ideologies of discrimination are constituted through (a) the spoken discourse of face-to-face conversations, (b) the mediated discourse of new technologies, and (c) the mediatized discourse of, for example, newspapers and commercial advertising.
Specifically, his research examines the discursive (or rhetorical) strategies people use to express their experiences and beliefs about cultural difference and how seemingly innocuous texts or mundane moments of talk actually serve to reproduce large-scale marginalizations with respect to class, age, ethnicity/nationality, and sexuality/gender. This work is inherently transdisciplinary and draws its theories, concepts and analytic practices from, amongst others, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, political economy, linguistic anthropology, and visual semiotics.
For the most part, Professor Thurlow is specifically interested in sites of social difference which are less commonly investigated in conventional communication scholarship. In practice, this means that his research centers on three principal domains of social life (in order of priority):
-global mobility, tourism and national/ethnic/class boundaries;
-youth, young people and intergenerational boundaries;
-sex, sexual identity and gendered boundaries.
Since they are such key contexts for much contemporary social interaction, he is always interested in the role of "new" communication technologies in each of these domains, but especially in the context of adolescence.
For more information about Professor Thurlow's work please click on the weblink above.
Selected Publications
Please visit Crispin's Web page for up-to-date information on his work.
