Research Fellow

Salary: As this vacancy has limited funding the maximum salary that can be offered is Grade 7, salary £36,024.
Contract Type: Fixed Term contract up to March 2027.

Background

This is a new role which has arisen through the award of an AHRC grant to Prof Alice Deignan (Lead Investigator) Prof. Jeannette Littlemore and Prof. Elena Semino (co-investigators), to fund a project entitled 'Young people, figurative language and criticality'. The project aims to describe the figurative language used with and by young people in the framing of ideology and new concepts, and to estimate their levels of awareness of this framing. The project will combine corpus building and analysis with interviews and think aloud protocol tasks. The project partners are the Universities of Birmingham and Lancaster, Oxford University Press, and schools in Birmingham and Yorkshire.

The successful candidate will be based at the University of Birmingham, working on campus. They will work full-time on the project, leading some aspects of its activity, as appropriate and agreed with the rest of the project team. It will involve some travel, both national and international.

Main Duties

As Research Fellow, you will work under the direction of Prof Littlemore to help ensure the project is successfully completed. Your main duties will include: visiting project partner schools to record language used in classroom settings and helping to analyse this language for figurative content; conducting studies in project partner schools to investigate whether and how children are able to unpack, critique and contest arguments framed through figurative language; helping to analyse the data produced in these studies; communicating or presenting the project results through conference presentations and/or other recognised forms of output; preparing papers for publication in leading international journals, jointly or solely, and independently writing reports; helping to organise and conduct events for non-academic stakeholders; maintaining your own continuing professional development and acting as a mentor to less experienced colleagues as appropriate; contributing to the research culture of the department.

Person Specification

As Research Fellow you will have: a first degree and PhD (or close to completion) in Linguistics, Applied Linguistics or a closely allied discipline; a strong background in metaphor studies in real world contexts; a strong interest in education; demonstrable experience in conducting research with human participants; good time management and planning skills, with the ability to meet tight deadlines and work effectively under pressure; excellent written and verbal communication skills including presentation skills and the ability to communicate effectively with a wide range of stakeholders; proven ability to manage competing demands effectively, responsibly and without close support; a proven ability to work well both individually and in a team; and a strong commitment to your own continuous professional development

Informal enquiries can be made to Professor Jeannette Littlemore (j.m.littlemore@bham.ac.uk).

To download the full job description and details of this position and submit an electronic application online please click on the 'Apply' button above.

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