New ESRC-funded project on vaccination discourse

A new health communications project will be starting in March 2021: Questioning Vaccination Discourse (Quo VaDis): a corpus-based study.

This is a £1m ESRC-funded project that will run for 3 years and apply the latest techniques for large-scale computer-aided discourse analysis to investigate how the public speak and write about vaccinations, specifically in social media discussions in English, UK Parliamentary debates and UK national press reports. The goal is to arrive at a better understanding of pro- and anti-vaccination views, as well as undecided views, to inform future public health campaigns. Although the project bid was submitted before Covid19, we will start by looking at discourses around the Covid19 vaccine. More in this news bulletin.

Zsófia Demjén, Centre for Applied Linguistics, is one of the CIs on this project: for further information or to connect regarding the topic, please get in touch with her.