Dr Reiner Grundmann, Reader in Sociology, has been researching and publishing in the field of global environmental problems, especially global climate change, for 15 years.
Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Lecturer in English, as well as contributing to various dictionaries and reference books for the Cobuild project at Birmingham University (1984-2003), has been researching and publishing in the field of corpus linguistics, using large collections of text to analyse language and discourse, for 20 years.
Phase 1 (2007-8): After preliminary discussions in 2007 (with £1000 funding from ACORN, and the help of a group of Masters students) a corpus was created, consisting of 600,000 newspaper articles (over 400 million words) on climate change from 1980-2008, in English (USA and UK), French, and German from Nexis UK . Analysed with WordSmith Tools, the initial findings were presented at the Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) 2008 conference, and published in the CADAAD Journal: The Discourse of Climate Change: A Corpus-based Approach.
Phase 2 (2009-11): With funding of £14,300 from the Centre for Sustainability and Innovation, recently renewed for a 2nd year, Phase 2 is focussing on Corporate climate change reporting and the media in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). The Research Group now includes: Dr Mike Scott (Reader in Corpus Linguistics, and the author of WordSmith Tools), Dr Prasanta Dey (Reader in Operations Management, Aston Business School), and Dr Belal Ataur (Lecturer, Finance and Accounting, Aston Business School). We have updated our initial Nexis corpus to include articles from 2008-2009, and from Brazil and India. In addition, with the kind permission and assistance of CorporateRegister.com, we have created a corpus of Corporate Sustainability Reports from Brazil and India. Initial findings have been presented at the IPA2010 conference in Grenoble, 'Discourse and Policy Practices - Politics, Legitimacy, Power', and at the British Science Festival, at which Reiner Grundmann also chaired a panel on Why we disagree about Climate Change.
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