Emma Franklin was one of our Post-Doctoral Research Associates working on Many Happy Returns. She is now Head of Safeguarding and Linguistic Analysis @sensocloud.
Emma’s role in Many Happy Returns was to construct and analyse 2 corpora (bodies of text) related to plastics and plastic reuse. This entailed focus groups as well as large-scale web crawling and text scraping. The study compared the language of manufacturers, retailers and other public-facing bodies with consumer-generated discourse to help inform best-practice recommendations for engaging with audiences around plastic reuse and return.
Emma organised the Posthumanising Sustainability symposium for the Grantham Centre, held on 25th June, 2021. This half-day event brought together expert speakers from philosophy, feminist studies, sociology and ecolinguistics, who presented innovative research in future-facing and post-anthropocentric sustainability. This was followed by an open discussion on how we might posthumanise our sustainability efforts and bring together the work of scholars in different fields. Collaborative, alternative sustainabilities are key to realising a fair future for all life on Earth and not only humans.
If you want to watch the symposium then you can find it on the Grantham Centre YouTube channel or click below ↓
Emma is a Corpus Linguist with special interests in corpus lexicography, verb argumentation, language-as-activism, and data-driven narrative strategy. Her PhD (2019), supervised by Prof Alison Sealey at Lancaster University, was a novel application of Corpus Pattern Analysis to verbal expressions of animal-killing.
Prior to her PhD, Emma completed an MRes in Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham (2015). Before that she took a BA in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton (2013), where she graduated with first-class honours and the prize for Best Student.
You can find out more about Emma’s research at her Google Scholar page here.