Language is used in a (social) context for various purposes, e.g. to lie, mislead other people or to tell the truth. The course explores the concepts, perspectives and methods that have been developed in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, rhetoric and discourse analysis to illuminate language as action. The course critically discusses the concepts of truth based on how they are used in speech and writing, provides analysis tools and applies these to, for example, fake news and bullshit.

The purpose of the course is to introduce basic theory and methodology for sampling, collection, preparation, annotation and analysis of text data in the humanities and social sciences, and to provide an overview of state-of-the-art language technology methods for automatically analysing large amounts of text.

The course addresses the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and offers PhD candidates theoretical and methodological tools to critically analyse space and its cultural significance from an interdisciplinary perspective and across time periods.

The course provides an overview of interaction research from the 1960s onwards with a focus on interactional research studies within three themes: from unimodality to multimodality; from membership categorization to social identity construction and from monolingualism to multilingualism. Empirical examples come from educational, everyday and working life contexts. The course also aims to develop the participants’ skills to perform interactional analyzes, especially for specific thesis projects.

The course deals with the emergence of new global linguistic communities, associated communicative practices, and the affordances that enable their existence. Different research issues are explored through empirical analyses of data related to language phenomena, such as writing across languages, protest movements, or language and luxury tourism.