Funded projects
Selected funded projects (click on the projects to find out more).
I am a co-investigator on the project ‘Developing corpus linguistics for use in family justice research’ funded by the ESRC Large Grant scheme.
The aim of the project is to create a suite of new corpora and draw on corpus linguistics (semi-automated textual analysis) as a methodological approach for multi-disciplinary collaborations for investigating pressing issues facing children and families in safeguarding and family justice system processes. The project has led to establishing the research centre CLASS (Corpus Linguistic Approaches to Safeguarding Studies) – a multi-site LAB at Lancaster, Aston and BCU.
As part of the project, I am leading the research programme on applications of corpus linguistics for wider access to justice topics, with the primary focus on how to support families in their journey to access the justice system and gain reliable information and advice. The research design I am working on involves a combination of corpus linguistics methods with experimental case studies and includes an exploration of AI enhanced corpus linguistics methods as well as a consideration of challenges and opportunities for court users to draw on AI generated legal support.
I led the project ‘Language of DIY Justice: Communication Practices & Processes’ funded by AHRC Standard Grant scheme.
The project drew on quantitative and qualitative mixed methods approaches to investigate the following aspects: communication as part of procedural justice and social justice; legal-lay discourses across different stages of legal proceedings; elicitation strategies used in court forms, court users’ experiences when using digitised court services, and narrativisation procedures across different types of civil proceedings. The wide scope of the project led to the discovery of issues with the language of court forms, communication during online courts, or narrativisation procedures in legal settings. For instance, the research conducted for the project illustrated that civil and family procedure rules routinely mute participants’ voices, mismanage language data, complicate the judiciary’s role and unnecessarily delay the presentation of parties’ narratives. The project results are presented across five journal articles and the forthcoming Cambridge Element.
Focusing on adversarial legal settings, the Cambridge Element titled Legal-Lay Discourse of County and Family Courts (2024, in print) explores discursive practices in court proceedings which often involve unrepresented parties – private family proceedings and small claims cases. Such proceedings present the main caseload of county and family courts, but pose immense challenges when it comes to legal-lay communication. Drawing on court observations, alongside textual and interview data, the Element pursues three aims: (1) developing the methodological and theoretical framework for exploring discursive practices in legal settings; (2) establishing the link between legal-lay discourse and procedural justice; (3) presenting and contextualising linguistic phenomena as an inherent part of court research and practice. The Element illustrates how linguistic input can contribute to procedural changes and court reforms across different adversarial and non-adversarial legal settings. The exploration of discursive practices embedded in court processes and procedures consolidates and advances the existing court research conducted within the fields of socio-legal studies and forensic linguistics.
I was a co-investigator on the project ‘TRAC: COVID – Trust And Communication: a Coronavirus Online Visual Dashboard’ funded by AHRC UKRI COVID-19 Research and Innovation.
The project collected over 80 million tweets and applied corpus linguistics methods to visualise the conglomerated data and create a dashboard traccovid.com. As part of the project, I led a case study on the Government management of the COVID-19 communication and public perception of the pandemic. The case study and the research findings were accepted as evidence for the report on Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic released by the House of Commons, Committee of Public Accounts and the National Audit Office. The case study and the project showcase the role public humanities play in enhancing policy-making and measuring the public trust in government bodies.
I led the project ‘Changing landscape of access to justice: Linguistic and socio-legal analysis of online forums for litigants in person’ funded by BA/Leverhulme Small Grants.
The project explored a grey area of the provision of legal advice online by analysing the quality and type of advice provided by McKenzie Friends, unregulated lay advisers who offer legal advice to court users for free or for a fee. The project showed that online forums and social media led by McKenzie Friends create a communicative environment in which the linguistic framing of the advice jeopardises its potential usefulness and creates a false sense of injustice, arguably misleading and potentially financially exploiting vulnerable users. The project also led to the discovery of common misconceptions among court users and the wider public, contributing to the research agenda of legal public education.
The project featured in professional publications and practitioner print, such as Legal Futures, The Law Society Gazette, The Times, Today’s Family Lawyer, Lawyer Monthly, Ministry of Justice Newsletter, which built on the project findings to promote the regulation of the lay advisers’ services and push for the need to provide clarity for consumers. As the only quantitative and qualitative empirical study of McKenzie Friends’ out-of-court services, the project provides a strong evidence base for reviewing the regulatory framework of the legal advice provision.
I led the project ‘Pro se language use’ funded by EU Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship scheme for Career Development Grant.
The project examined a corpus of trial transcripts from cases with litigants in person tried in England and Wales, USA and Canada. The focus was on communication challenges experienced by unrepresented litigants when conducting witness examination, delivering opening and closing arguments and discussing procedural matters with judges and legal representatives for the opposing party.