Cathy Bollaert

Cathy is a PhD student with the Transitional Justice Institute at the University of Ulster. She holds an MA in African Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Bradford — where she was selected as a Rotary World Peace Fellow — and an MA in African Theology from the Akrofi-Chrystaller Institute for the Study of Theology and Culture in Ghana. Coming from South Africa, her research interests relate to identity politics and, in particular, to the impact that group identity and worldview have on building and sustaining peace.

Cathy also works as a peace and reconciliation education and training consultant. She draws on her experience in South Africa, where she facilitated reconciliation and cross-cultural integration workshops; Sri Lanka, where she worked as an education consultant and Tsunami Relief worker; Bradford, where she facilitated interfaith dialogue to promote community cohesion, and Northern Ireland, where she worked promoting cross-community youth development.

 

Patricia Canning

Patricia completed her PhD at Queen's University, Belfast, where her teaching and research in language and language use extends across a range of disciplines including stylistics, forensic linguistics, cognitive linguistics and phenomenology. She is author of Style In The Renaissance: Language and Ideology in Early Modern England (Continuum) and has contributed to a range of journals and books, including Language and Literature and Critical Survey.

Patricia is founder of read.live.learn, a dynamic, high impact community project that uses literature in all sorts of contexts and environments (including workplaces, prisons, hospitals and universities) to connect people and improve mental health and wellbeing. This project began in a female prison in Belfast, and Patricia aims to develop it in the Netherlands in 2014. She is currently working on an article that explores the potential for cognitive linguistics, specifically Text World Theory, to act as a framework for comprehending the impact of direct and indirect experience prior to and following incarceration (importation and deprivation factors) on the shared reading experiences of female prisoners.

 

Diarmait Mac Giolla Chriost

Professor Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost is a member of the School of Welsh, Cardiff University. He is a native of Ireland and an authority on linguistic minorities and language planning, and, in particular, the situation of the Celtic languages. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Historical Society. He has worked as an expert advisor to a wide range of bodies, including the UK Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, Highlands and Islands Enterprise Scotland, and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, on public policy in relation to both the Irish and the Welsh language.

 

Matthew Evans

Matthew has been studying and working at the University of Huddersfield since beginning his undergraduate studies in 2006, and joined the Language in Conflict project in 2011. His main interests within the field are critical stylistics and corpus linguistics. In particular, he is interested in the meanings that particular words have for people. He is currently working on a paper for the Language in Conflict project on how the meanings of specific concepts are negotiated in war crimes trials, and a PhD on the portrayal of the words 'feminism' and 'feminist' in the British press.

His previous studies and work have focused on linguistic issues in politics. Matthew's degree dissertation used critical stylistics to look at the implicit ideologies in both pro- and anti-gay rights texts, and in his MA he used both corpus linguistics and critical stylistics to analyse and compare the Conservative and Liberal Democrat manifestos and the coalition's 'Programme for Government'. He has also looked at the analysis of political language in his work on a project on the rising use of the ideological concept of 'choice' in British manifestos.

 

Patrick Howse

Patrick Howse joined the BBC as a trainee in 1989. After working in local radio, regional television and national TV news, he was a newsgathering field producer from 2000 to 2011. In this role he covered conflicts in Northern Ireland, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and particularly in Iraq, where he acted as bureau chief between 2004 and 2009.

He was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after narrowly escaping death in a rocket attack in Baghdad. He writes poetry about his experiences and the ongoing recovery process.

For more information on Patrick and a wider selection of his poetry, have a look at his website (http://www.patrickhowse.co.uk) and follow him on Twitter (@Baghdaddi).

 

Lesley Jeffries

Lesley is Professor of English Language at the University of Huddersfield, where she has worked since 1990. She is the Director of the Stylistics Research Centre and the principal investigator on the Language in Conflict project. She has published books and articles on the relationship between language and ideology as well as developing critical stylistics, a framework for describing the meanings created in texts which aims to provide a means to identify and understand ideological content. She is currently working on an analysis of trial transcripts from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

2007. Textual Construction of the Female Body: A Critical Discourse Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

2010. Opposition in Discourse. London: Continuum Books.

2010. Critical Stylistics: The Power of English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

 

John Kelly

John is a writer, researcher, and educator living in Southern California in the United States. He is interested in the etymology of the English language, and the ways in which word origins can help deepen understandings of human cognition, culture, and the experience of being in the world. He blogs on etymologies weekly at The Mashed Radish. Degreed in education and English, he has a background teaching diverse students in urban and high-need schools, and strives to use literacy of all forms to promote meaningful, successful lives, especially for those lost in the conflict that is poverty.

 

Milena Marinkova

Milena Marinkova is a Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield. She completed her PhD at the University of Leeds, and has also held teaching appointments at the Universities of Leeds, Birmingham, Derby and Teesside. Her research on Canadian literature and culture is informed by broader debates in postcolonial theory, the intersection of the aesthetic and the political, and the role of the somatic and the affective in creative and critical practice.

Milena is the author of Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing (2011), the co-editor of Visions of Canada: Canadian Studies in Europe (2007), and the co-convenor of the Literature Group of the British Association for Canadian Studies (BACS). Her articles have been published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Moving Wor(l)ds, Third Text, European Journal of English Studies and The British Journal of Canadian Studies. Milena is currently working on a monograph interrogating 'the Balkan' as a trope in contemporary Canadian and Australian literature.

 

Edith Natukunda-Togboa

Having been trained at Gayaza High School, Makerere University and Université de Provence 1 (France), Dr Natukunda is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies, Head of Department of European & Oriental Languages (DEOL) at Makerere University and a senior language consultant. Her research areas of interest include Gender and Development, peace and conflict studies, and discourse analysis.

Edith's most recent publications include "Gender and Gendered Discourse among the Banyakitara" in The Cultures of the Banyakitara (2012), and "From the Language of Conflict to That of Peace-Building: The Role of Discourse in the Conflict in Northern Uganda" in the Africa Peace and Conflict Journal (2008).

 

Jim O'Driscoll

Jim O'Driscoll has worked for nearly four decades in six different countries in Europe and the Middle East. His research interests are informed by his experience of different languages and environments and straddle several aspects of language-in-situated-use, from both sociolinguistic and pragmatic viewpoints. At present, they include words and texts that cause (or appear to have caused) public offence.

His articles have appeared in Journal of Pragmatics, Multilingua, Functions of Language, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Politeness Research, Intercultural Pragmatics and Pragmatics and Society.

In 2009, the second edition of Britain, Jim's book on British culture for learners of English, was published.

 

Edith Podhovnik

Edith received her PhD in English Language from the University of Swansea and a Master's degree in English and Russian from the Karl Franzens Universität Graz.

She is currently senior lecturer at the Department of International Management and Department of Journalism and PR at the University of Applied Sciences FH Joanneum Graz, teaching courses in Cross-Cultural Communication and Culture (English, Russian), Academic Writing and Research, Journalistic Writing, Conflict Resolution and Negotiations. She has lectured in various countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia.

She regularly contributes articles on culture to Russian online journals as a freelance journalist, and writes a blog on Russian language in cross-cultural communication. Her research interests include cross-cultural communication, language in international business, regional and social language variation, and phonology.

 

James Rodgers

James is Lecturer in Journalism at City University London, and a former BBC correspondent in Moscow, Brussels, and Gaza. Before becoming a journalist, he studied Modern Languages (Russian and French) at the University of Oxford, and recently completed his PhD by prior output, 'Reflective journalistic practice in an environment of uncertainty and change', at London Metropolitan University.

He is the author of Reporting Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and No Road Home: Fighting for Land and Faith in Gaza (Abramis, 2013). You can follow James on Twitter at @jmacrodgers.

 

Roger Seaman

Roger works as a community and workplace mediator and as a meeting facilitator (using participatory approaches). He was awarded a doctorate for his study of workplace mediation in 2010. Within his thesis he developed an approach to mediating called Explorative Mediation, built upon a respectful critique of the Transformative and Narrative schools. From practical experience of facilitating democratic, small group discussions he has become interested in studying how dominant discourses may influence debate, dialogue and decisions within such groups.

More information about Roger's approach to mediating and facilitating and the notion of an aspiration for an ideal of dialogue can be found at website.

 

Elizabeth Stokoe

Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her research interests include the study of social interaction across a variety of contexts including police interrogation, community and family mediation, dating, education, and communication training. Some of her research underpins the 'Conversation Analytic Role-play Method' (CARM), a technique for communication training (see www.carmtraining.org). She has run hundreds of workshops with mediators and police officers. CARM won Loughborough University's Social Enterprise award (2013) and Prof Stokoe was awarded British Psychological Society mid-career award in 2011. Elizabeth is also a board member of the College of Mediators and her research and biography was the subject of BBC Radio 4's 'The Life Scientific' in June 2013.