Researcher

Associate Professor Michele Zappavigna

Fields of Research (FoR)

Discourse and pragmatics, Communication and media studies, Corpus linguistics

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Biography

As a linguist, my primary focus is on exploring the discourse of social media, in terms of linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal patterns. Essentially I am interested in ‘ambient affiliation’: how people bond online. Some of this research has been published in my books Discourse of Twitter and Social Media and Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse. Other recent work includes Discourse and Diversionary...view more
As a linguist, my primary focus is on exploring the discourse of social media, in terms of linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal patterns. Essentially I am interested in ‘ambient affiliation’: how people bond online. Some of this research has been published in my books Discourse of Twitter and Social Media and Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse. Other recent work includes Discourse and Diversionary Justice.
 
More here: http://michelezappavigna.com

My Awards

Dean's Research Award for Scholarly Impact

Dr Michele Zappavigna for her book: Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web (London: Bloomsbury, 2012)

"Michele Zappavigna’s Discourse of Twitter and Social Media displays impressive conceptual and methodological innovation and compelling scholarly impact across a wide range of discipline areas such as language studies, discourse analysis, social media analysis, and cyber security studies. The research has the potential to open up new lines of inquiry with corresponding impact on real-world practice."


My Research Supervision


Supervision keywords


Areas of supervision

I currently teaching Social Media ARTS2091 and Mobile Cultures ARTS2093.

I am interested in supervising projects in the following areas:

  • Discourse of social media
  • Systemic Functional Linguistics
  • Social semiotics and multimodality

 

Current PhD students

Lorenzo Logi - Bonding, Affiliation & Culture in stand-up comedy

Nida Tahseen - Harassment of female digital journalists engaged in reporting political issues

Awni Shati Mohammad Etaywe - Language as Evidence: A Pragmatic and Discourse Analysis Approach to Examining Written Terrorist Threatening Communication

Giselle Newton - Seeking information and support; donor conceived people’s experiences, values and practices 

Olivia Inwood - A Discourse Analytic Approach to Deception and Mis-information

 

Past Honours students

Olivia Inwood - Understanding the values enacted in blockchain technologies by applying social semiotics and the walkthrough method 

Giselle Newton - Affiliation in discourse about contraception on Reddit:  How do users bond around health values?

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