Course Schedule

Veranstaltungen von Dr. Onwu Inya


Lehrveranstaltungen

Language, Discourse and the Environment (FSL) (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Onwu Inya

Termin:
 wöchentlich | Montag | 10:15 - 11:45 | 14.10.2024 - 31.01.2025 | C 16.109 /110 Seminarraum

Inhalt: As much as environmental and sustainability issues are within the scientific purview, they are equally constituted in discourse, for instance, policy documents, media reports, advertisements, conversations and presentations in conferences on sustainability and the environment, inscriptions on placards during climate campaigns etc. Typically, these discourses are underscored by agendas, ideologies, values and beliefs that require a trained eye to spot. In this seminar, we explore how language is used in discourses about the environment, and how this language use encourages eco-friendly actions and decisions, or eco-destructive behaviours. As Stibbes (2015, p. 2) argues, “the link between ecology and language is that how humans treat each other and the natural world is influenced by our thoughts, concepts, ideas, ideologies and worldviews, and these in turn are shaped through language.” The goal of this seminar, therefore, is that students will learn how to apply theories and methodologies in linguistics and discourse analysis to different texts on the subjects of the environment and sustainability. These texts, which range from policy documents, advertisement, newspapers, eco-literary and eco-cinematic products, will largely be drawn from the Global South. This is to introduce the students to cultural expressions other than their own, and to enable them set up cross-cultural understanding and comparison of environmental issues between the Global North and the Global South. Finally, at the end of the seminar, students would have learnt about concepts such as ideologies, metaphors, evaluations, identities and eco-criticism, and how to apply them to real-life texts on the environment. The empirical and analytical skillset acquired in this seminar can be transferred to discourses in other contexts.