Academic interests
- Climate change discourse
- Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS)
- Ecolinguistics
- Metaphors
- Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
PhD project
My PhD project examines the ways in which climate change is communicated and understood in the language of UK politicians and UK climate change activists, covering the ten-year period between 2014 and 2023. This includes how the phenomenon itself is discursively constructed, as well as causes and effects of climate change, climate change action, and human-nature relations. I use a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach.
My supervisors are Daniel Lees Fryer and Ben Clarke.
Background
I am a doctoral research fellow at Østfold University College and Gothenburg University. I am part of the ELLA research programme at ØUC (Education, Literature, Language). I have a master’s degree in Communication from the University of Gothenburg (MSc) and an undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh (MA Hons). I also have several years’ experience of teaching English as a foreign language.
Projects
Publications
Currie, J. S. G., & Clarke, B. P. (2022). FIGHTING TALK: The use of the conceptual metaphor CLIMATE CHANGE IS CONFLICT in the UK Houses of Parliament, 2015-2019. Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of language and politics, 2022. doi: http://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21052.cur
Currie, J. S. G. (2025). Cutting emissions, halting biodiversity loss: climate change solutions in the language of UK politicians and UK climate activists, 2018–2020. Text & Talk. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2024-0231