Dear all, 

The new series of Activism In Progress, organised by the sub-committee for race and social justice in linguistics, begins promptly with a presentation at 2pm on Wednesday 15th January, from Dr Leigh Harrington (Manchester). Title and abstract are below. Please register in advance via the Zoom registration link. Do share with anyone else who would be interested! 

And don't forget, you can nominate yourself or someone else to present in the series. The work can be at any stage (even early thoughts), and you can be at any career stage in any role. It just has to have some relevance to linguistics, ideally in the UK. Use this Google form to make a nomination. 

Plunged into fuel poverty: Fuel poverty and the (new) fuel poor in UK newspapers in the winters of 2019-20 and 2020-21

Fuel poverty, a household’s inability to achieve thermal comfort in line with a healthy standard of living at a reasonable cost (Boardman, 1991), became an increasingly prevalent and visible socio-economic issue in the UK during the 2020-21 winter lockdowns. Using FuelPovertyPressUK, a specialised corpus of UK newspaper reporting, this talk addresses the discursive representation of fuel poverty as a distinct form of social-economic inequality (Boardman, 2010). The talk conducts a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse analysis, comparing Pre-COVID-19 Winter (September 2019–March 2020) and During-COVID-19 Winter (September 2020-March 2021) subcorpora. The findings demonstrate newspaper reporting adequately reflecting the increasing heterogeneity of the (new) fuel poor across COVID-19 and the fuel poor ultimately being positioned as agentless. The paper highlights the value of corpus methods to linguistics-based and interdisciplinary poverty research and the challenge posed to corpus and discourse studies by analysing the representation of indeterminate and in flux social groups.