The next speaker in our Institute of Humanities research seminar series is Professor Joanna Gavins from the University of Sheffield.
The talk’s title is Every little ‘help’: understanding the FAMILY frame in the discourse of plastic packaging
There’s an abstract below
Time: 4-5pm, Wednesday 4 June 2025
Place: Room 305, Northumberland Building, City Campus, Northumbria University
Also online: email Billy Clark to join online: billy.clark@northumbria.ac.uk
Directions and campus map: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-campuses/newcastle-city-campus
Abstract:
This talk will report on some of the research undertaken as part of the ‘Many Happy Returns’ project at the University of Sheffield. This multi-disciplinary project brought together scientists, engineers, social scientists and linguists to explore reusable packaging systems (https://grantham.sheffield.ac.uk/research-projects/many-happy-returns-plastic/). Our aim was to devise new ways of keeping packaging material in circulation for as long as possible before recycling, reducing the environmental impact of plastic. The Language team on ‘Many Happy Returns’ built a corpus of over 4.5 million words of naturally occurring discourse about plastics and analysed this using corpus-linguistic methods. One of our key findings was that the conceptual frame of the FAMILY plays a key role in the stories we tell about plastics in our everyday lives. My talk will examine how this frame is employed by large organisations, such as retailers and manufacturers, and compare these patterns of usage with the stories their customers tell about themselves. I will also make suggestions for potential ways in which the stylistic choices of large organisations could be reframed in order to make their communications with customers more effective and to encourage more pro-environmental behaviour.
Northumbria Englishes 