The Language, Ideology and Power research group (LIP) is based in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University.  LIP was first set up around 30 years ago by Norman Fairclough, was then taken over by Ruth Wodak, and more recently has been convened by Chris Hart and Veronika Koller. The current co-convenors are Johnny Unger, Evelin Nikolova, and Steve Strudwick.

Researchers associated with the group investigate the way language and other semiotic resources are used to communicate, legitimate and reproduce social identities and relations in a variety of contexts. As such, our work falls broadly within the interdisciplinary field of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), an approach to discourse and discourse analysis which focuses on the way social issues are constructed through text and talk. Our research addresses, for example:

• The discursive construction of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in media and political communication
• Digitally mediated politics
• Language policy and representations of minority languages
• Right-wing populist discourses, including in multimodal texts
• Multilingualism in European institutions

We have strong ties with other research groups in the department including the Discourse and Text Research Group, the Literacy Research Centre and the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science.

We welcome new members, visiting researchers and guest speakers. If you are interested in presenting at a LIP meeting or would like to join the mailing list, please contact one of the current co-convenors (see above). For updates, you can follow us on Twitter.

To view our current programme, visit this page.