March 6 (2021) International Meeting (Swiss Day)
We would like to thank Olivia and Lara for the wonderful presentations, and all the participants who contributed to a successful meeting!
In the photo: Olivia Droz-dit-Busset (Presenter 1), Lara Portmann (Presenter 2), Yu Kanazawa (Coordinator / Event host)
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日本語の情報は：http://www.let-kansai.org/htdocs/index.php?page_id=74
Date: Saturday, March 6 (2021)
Time: 15:30-18:30 (Japan Standard Time (JST): UTC+9)
Venue: Zoom
Online registration is needed.
Free event - all welcome!!
Please use the following link to register:
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Presentation1
The big business of creativity: A frame analysis of social media influencers’ bricolage in advertising discourse.
by Olivia Droz-dit-Busset
SNF funded PhD Candidate
Language and Communication, Department of English
Bern University, Switzerland
Presentation2
The rhetorics of creativity in professional language work: The case of UX writers.
by Lara Portmann
PhD Candidate and Assistant
Language and Communication, Department of English
Bern University, Switzerland
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Presentation1 details
Presenter1 Bio:
Olivia Droz-dit-Busset is PhD candidate in Language and Communication at the University of Bern, collaborating on the “Elite Creativities” SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation) funded project lead by her supervisor, Professor Crispin Thurlow. Situated in the fields of digital discourse and language work, her doctorate thesis explores the ways social media influencers craft language as new-generation copywriters.
Abstract:
Social media influencers or content creators (henceforth SMIs) are at the forefront of contemporary language work (see Cameron, 2000); they are examples of what Thurlow (2020) characterizes as wordsmiths, or people whose professional livelihood depends on the crafting of language. In this presentation, I examine the various ways SMIs create advertising on their social platforms through a blending of personal and commercial discourses (e.g. peer-to-peer recommendations; cf. Kelly-Holmes, 2016). Specifically, I focus on instances of sponsored content, which, I suggest, constitute moments where SMIs must navigate the precarious position of mediating between brands and consumers, in order to cater at the same time to their audiences’ needs and their sponsors’ demands. In this regard, and following the frame analysis proposed by Goffman (1974), I discuss a collection of YouTube videos from one SMI which all contain a commercial message from the same sponsor, but which vary in their copywriting. I argue that the SMI thereby attempts creative discursive variations of what Lévi-Strauss (1966) calls bricolage, intertwining commercial content with humour and play to entertain his audiences while still hitting his sponsor’s talking points. While complicating the divide between work and play, the SMI’s practices seem to embody Thurlow’s (2019) statement: “creativity is clearly big business, and it pays to play”.
References:
Cameron, D. (2000). Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(3), pp.323-347.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard University Press.
Kelly-Holmes, H. (2016). Digital advertising. In A. Georgakopoulou & T. Spilioti (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication (pp. 212–225). London: Routledge.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
Thurlow, C. (Ed.) (2020). The Business of Words: Wordsmiths, Linguists and Other Language Workers. London: Routledge.
Thurlow, C. (2019). Semiotic creativities in and with space: binaries
and boundaries, beware! International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(1), 94-104.
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Presentation2 details
Presenter2 Bio:
Lara Portmann is a PhD candidate in Language and Communication at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her PhD project investigates the language work of so-called UX (“user experience”) writers, those professional language workers who design the linguistic texts appearing at the interfaces of websites, mobile apps, and other software. This project, affiliated with the SNSF-funded (Swiss National Science Foundation) project “Elite Creativities”, seeks to provide a critical sociolinguistic understanding of a new domain of (elite) language work, namely UX writing, and entails a particular concern for how UX writers explicitly and implicitly design audiences when conceiving and crafting software interface texts.
Abstract:
In sociocultural linguistics, there has been growing interest in, and expanded conceptualization of, creativity (e.g. Jones, 2016; Swann & Deumert, 2018). At the same time, creativity continues to be important in business and professional contexts (e.g. Wilf, 2020). In other words, creativity is big business (Thurlow, 2019). In this presentation, I will look at how creativity surfaces in the work of so-called UX (‘user experience’) writers. These are professional language workers typically responsible for designing the verbal texts people see when interacting with websites or software. Analysing some of the claims that UX writers make about their own work as being creative (or not), I consider how notions of creative language depend as much on semiotic ideologies (Keane, 2018) as they do on strictly linguistic properties. Following Thurlow (2019), I argue that creativity is therefore not just a technical, linguistic accomplishment, but also a rhetorical or discursive tactic. Ultimately, both creativity and non-creativity are enmeshed in structures of power and inequality. Indeed, for UX writers, (non-)creativity is a means for negotiating the cultural and political-economic value of their work.
References:
Jones, R. H. (Ed.) (2016). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity. London and New York: Routledge.
Keane, W. (2018). On semiotic ideology. Signs and Society, 6(1), 64–87.
Swann, J. & Deumert, A. (2018). Sociolinguistics and language creativity. Language Sciences, 65, 1–8.
Thurlow, C. (2019). Semiotic creativities in and with space: Binaries and boundaries, beware! International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(4), 94–104.
Wilf, E. (2020). Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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