Cardiff School of English Communication and Philosophy

Research Groups

Language in Society: involving theoretical reflection on, and methodologies for the analysis of, the role of language in communicative and cultural encounters, including tourism, ageing, literary and media texts, and interactions involving professionals and lay persons (courts, police, health).
Language knowledge, form and function: theoretically-grounded descriptions of language, including Functional Grammar, discourse theory, psycholinguistics and formulaic language theory, applied to real-world problems, such as diagnosing and alleviating developmental, acquired and degenerative disorders; language learning; proficiency measuring; forensic investigation; and communication policy and practice in law and health.

Literary and cultural history: much work is related to individual authors, groups of authors, and genres, but shares a preoccupation with close attention to the literary text and a concern for the complex and open-ended relations between text and cultural change.
Critical and cultural theory (Cultural history; Theories of Gender and Sexuality; Poststructuralism): involving theoretical reflection on, and methodologies for the analysis of, the ways in which meanings are produced and individual and collective subjectivities are constructed through cultural texts, objects and practices.

Philosophy of mind, language, and science: includes work on several topics but with a special emphasis on perception and the senses, accounts of the mind as enactive and embodied; scientific realism, as well as decision theory and the epistemics of belief.
Ethics: theoretical examination and application of the philosophical foundations of bio-ethics and environmental ethics, particularly the ethics of medicine, genetics and genomics, and the ethics of changing and safeguarding the environment.