Courses

My teaching at undergraduate and graduate level is largely in the field of Language and Communication or Discourse Studies. At the University of Bern, courses are taught either as lectures (typically larger, more general, and more instructor-driven with a final exam) or seminars (typically smaller, more specialist, and more discussion-based with a final paper/presentation or cumulative coursework). Here is a list of the courses that I have been regular teaching and/or am currently teaching, followed by some indicative, recent course descriptions:

  • Language and Waste (see below)
  • Language and Sexuality (see below)
  • Language and Society
  • Language and Globalization
  • Language and Materiality (see below)
  • Language and Space/Place (see below)
  • Discourse Studies
  • Critical Discourse Studies
  • Digital Discourse (see below)
  • Tourism Discourse (see below)
  • Professional Discourse
  • Visual Communication (see below)
  • Nonverbal Communication
  • Intercultural Communication

LANGUAGE AND WASTE (seminar)
The “Language and Waste” seminar explores and collaboratively develops a novel critical-linguistic perspective on the crisis-level topic of waste. Students are asked to investigate how everyday language shapes the social meanings of waste and, as such, how it helps structure the wider political and symbolic economies of environmental collapse. Examples of the kinds of empirical questions to be asked include: What does “waste” mean to people – what are its social or collective meanings in different contexts? How is waste defined and represented in everyday and/or official talk and texts? How is waste mediatized (e.g. in newspapers, advertisements, etc.)? How is the label “waste” deployed metaphorically against certain peoples or activities? To what extent do people understand – and talk about – their own role in the production and/or management of waste? The seminar is designed as a “laboratory course” which means it is hinges on student-driven, project-based learning experiences where you will be actively engaged in producing new knowledge for the field.

LANGUAGE AND SEXUALITY (lecture)
Our ideas about, and experiences of sexuality have powerful social and societal implications; they shape the identities, relationships and statuses of people. Typically, of course, we are also encouraged to think of both sex and sexuality as matters of the body and of body parts. But sex and sexuality are quite apparently also a matter of imagination, representation and cultural politics. And this is true in all societies around the world, although happening in very different, usually very unequal ways. Indeed, no study of sexuality can be done properly without attending also to the complex ways it intersects with, most notably, nationality, ethnicity/race, dis/ability, age, class and, of course, gender. This lecture series invites students to consider how sex and sexuality are understood as discursively framed and accomplished. Students will be exposed to a range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, as well as a diverse array of social settings and cultural experiences.

LANGUAGE AND MATERIALITY (lecture)
In this lecture series we will consider a range of ways in which language has material consequences for our everyday lives. By the same token, we will also examine how language is itself something material and how it shapes and is shaped by material culture. We will start by thinking through the “hardcore” economies and politics of language/s nowadays, before looking at how language functions multimodally as a spatial, embodied and tangible practice. In this regard, and following an initial introductory lecture, the course will be organized into bi-weekly cycles addressing five major thematics: commodification, global semioscape, space/place, embodiment and objects/things. Lectures will be structured around a series of framing and case-study readings, and, where possible, we will hear first-hand from some of the case-study authors themselves. Every other week, our class time will involve a short in-class exercise in order to apply some of the ideas covered in the readings.

VISUAL COMMUNICATION (seminar)
This seminar is all about ways of seeing - literally and metaphorically – and about looking at language in its broader communicative (or mediated) contexts. We will be exploring different perspectives on the everyday world of images, image-making, design and visual discourse. In particular, we will be learning to understand visual discourse by viewing it through different academic theories/methods (e.g. social semiotics, visual rhetoric, cultural studies), while examining a range of "real world" sites of visual production (e.g. advertising, fashion, fine art) and a number of different visual modes (e.g. typography, photography, colour). A critical understanding of visual discourse is, as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen indicate, essential for contemporary life and, therefore, for contemporary scholars of language. Understanding how other semiotic modes work helps us to understand how language works; this also helps us recognize the inherently multimodal nature of all communicative action.

DIGITAL DISCOURSE (lecture)
"So called Web 2.0 and so called social media are everywhere and there is talk of them everywhere. What are we – as citizens and as scholars – to make of widespread discourses about this latest round of new media? Are we making anything of them?" (Thurlow, 2013). This lecture series offers a survey of contemporary research on digital discourse, examining the practices and politics of language-use in new communication technologies. Looking at instant messaging, textmessaging, blogging, photo-/video-sharing, social networking and gaming, we will cover a range of domains (e.g. journalism, tourism, entertainment, politics), communicators (e.g. professional and lay, young people and adults, intimates and groups), and languages (e.g. Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish, German, Greek). Following an initial introductory lecture, the course is organized into bi-weekly cycles addressing five major thematics in digital discourse studies: “mediation”, “language ideology”, “multilingualism”, “multimodality” and “technologization”. In-class lecture presentations we examine case studies drawn from the core text and, where possible, we hear first-hand from the authors themselves. Every other week, our class time is centred around a featured article and a related in-class exercise drawing on students' own experience of digital discourse.

TOURISM DISCOURSE (seminar)
As a truly global service industry tourism is all-pervading. There are few people whose lives remain unaffected by tourism, be it people privileged enough to tour or people who are "toured." It is precisely because of tourism's scale and influence that scholars in such fields as anthropology, sociology, history, cultural studies, geography, discourse studies and others have increasingly been interested in exploring the cultural practices by which tourism is organized and experienced. This diverse body of research reveals tourism's powerful role in shaping and reflecting such things as the performance of identity, ideologies of difference, the meanings of place, and the production and consumption of visual-material culture, all of which intersect with relations of power/inequality. Indeed, tourism seldom merely represents a place or reflects a culture; tourism is instrumental in producing the very places and cultures that visitors seek to know. From a fully interdisciplinary perspective, this seminar examines tourism as discursive formation – a way of knowing and organizing the world establishing through language, communication and other social processes. Throughout the quarter we look at tourism from various historical, critical, and cultural perspectives. In addition to following a series of independent (but guided) reading and research demonstrations from Professor Thurlow’s own sociolinguistic/discourse analytic work, students are invited to undertake their own applied research as a way to experiment with various disciplinary modes of gathering and analysing data.

LANGUAGE AND SPACE/PLACE (excursion seminar)
This seminar takes students on a carefully designed scholarly and cultural journey whose main focus is the way human communication (e.g. language/s, visual images, social interactions) is organized in contemporary urban settings. The seminar considers the way different modes of communication are used to represent and construct these urban spaces. This is what some scholars refer to as the study of “semiotic landscapes” and draws on cutting-edge ideas from across the social sciences and humanities. In understanding the situated nature of urban communication, there is no substitute for moving through cities first-hand, observing the flow and organization of spatial practices, listening to and recording interactions, etc. To this end, the ethnographic focus is on Berlin as an ideal site for exploring and understanding urban communication and the social production of space/place. Through a combination of hands-on fieldwork, scholarly reading and class discussions students learn about the representation, organization and discursive production of Berlin in ways that go well beyond the usual touristic ways of seeing. Before students start digging around in other people’s spaces, however, they also learn to look at their own back yard (i.e. Bern) with news eyes and with a sharper, more critical awareness.