Dear all,
I recently completed a fascinating piece of research for a global environmental charity. They gave me permission to share it with you so long as I didn’t mention the name of the charity.
I enjoyed this because it was putting ecolinguistics into practical action. It was background research to inform a global campaign to encourage people to reduce their consumption of industrially-produced meat and dairy products because of the damage they do to the environment.
Doing this work brought up some interesting questions – do I follow my own personal ecosophy, or the ecosophy of the charitable organisation that I’m working for? My answer was to only follow those aspects of the ecosophy of the charity which aligned with my own ecosophy. If there weren’t any then I would have refused to do the work. But in this case there were enough commonalities to have a solid foundation to conduct the analysis.
The charity asked me to write the report in notes, tables and images rather than full text. I discovered that this was an extremely useful way to put together an organised overview of the analysis. If anyone is doing a PhD or a major research report I would recommend producing a report like this and then expanding it out into full text.
I’d be interested in doing more of this kind of applied work in the future, perhaps as part of a team working on a funded research project. If you come across any opportunities then please let me know.
all the best,
Arran
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Arran Stibbe
Academic Course Leader, English
Reader in Ecological Linguistics
School of Liberal and Performing Arts
University of Gloucestershire
astibbe@GLOS.AC.UK