If you're interested in health communication, broadly conceived, join the research seminars of the UCL Health Communication Network. Available to attend remotely with the next event on 22nd Jan, 1pm. blogs.ucl.ac.uk/health-comms... Sign up to our mailing list to hear about future events

The language of illness shifts responsibility away from systems and onto individuals as if individuals were not living inside the very structures that shape their lives

Call for Papers for our 2026 webinar: ‘Key Health and Science Communication Challenges in the 2020s’ We’re delighted to share the cfp for our upcoming event. If you’re considering submitting, we’d love to hear from you. The deadline for submission is 5pm, February 9th 2026. wp.me/pcqSKn-dv

This resonates a bit too much... theconversation.com/the-5-stages...

Physicist Leo Szilard, in a short science fiction story from 1948, describing how to retard science by making the funding application longer and harder than the proposed research - now called the ‘Szilard point’

"How can funders avoid crossing the Szilard point?" The Szilard point is "the threshold at which the total cost of competing for a grant equals (or surpasses) the value of the available funding."

'Simulation Training to Advance Role-playing Skills (STARS): a collaborative project to cross-skill clinicians to role-play clinical communication simulations' Join us today at 1pm for a seminar of the UCL Health communication network. Details: blogs.ucl.ac.uk/health-comms...

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Scientific evidence shows, once again, there is no causal link between vaccines and autism. Vaccines cause adults. - @drtedros.who.int

Our book 'Applying Corpus Linguistics to Illness and Healthcare' is out open access! We wrote it to share what we learnt in many years of research in @corpussocialsci.bsky.social, on topics such as communication about anxiety, dementia, cancer, obesity and vaccines. cambridgeblog.org/2025/08/appl...

Making science songs I wrote what follows in 2012. Now it's 2021, I can't believe it, and we are living in a time when science has become a matter of survival. We are living through the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines have been developed at speed to help us get out of this mess. Music and songs…

Congratulations to Dr @bethmalory.bsky.social on being named a BBC New Generation Thinker 2025. Dr Malory will join five other early career researchers to shape programming on BBC Radio 4, bringing new ideas to audiences www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/ju... ‪@uclenglishusage.bsky.social ‪@ukri.org‬

Thanks for the reminder @janemunday.bsky.social. Every summer, I repost this article DROWNING DOES NOT LOOK LIKE DROWNING. To date, I know of FOUR kids who were saved after someone who'd clicked on the link learnt how to spot actual drowning. Take time to read and pass on. slate.com/technology/2...

New short paper out in Public Health: 'A jab is not a vaccine; it's a 'shot' www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Spotted in the wild: An advance copy of The Literary Lifeline, showcasing bibliotherapy in action! Out in July, this insightful book is a tribute to the transporting and consoling power of reading: Bloomsbury.com/literary-lifeline-9781472583604/

Happy to share the rarest of things these days: an ad for a permanent full-time lectureship in linguistics: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... We are particularly interested in candidates with expertise in Language Teaching and Technology.

We're looking for UK men aged 40-65 to give us some paid feedback on a video featuring 2 men talking about experiences of #suicidal thoughts. We want to know if it will be helpful for other men, even if they have never felt suicidal. Up to 1 hour of your time to help in our #suicideprevention work.

"Scale isn't a substitute for scrutiny" resonates with Schegloff's (1993) "quantification is no substitute for analysis” (p. 114) in conversation analysis #EMCA

🚨new Indie SAGE report on childhood diseases! 🧵Vaccines have been so successful that once common diseases are now so rare that even many doctors might never see a case. In this report we describe 12 diseases, their consequences & impact of vaccines 1/15 independentsage.org/report/preve...

After a soft launch in the last couple of weeks, #wmatrix version 7 is now completely freely available worldwide for academic users plus UK government and NHS email addresses. This is the largest revision of the software since it was created 25 years ago: ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/

Post-pandemic, a new type of vaccine scepticism has emerged online, underscoring the need for public health messaging to address confusion around what vaccines do – finds research co-authored by @zsofiademjen.bsky.social with Lancaster University. bit.ly/41Kg8dX

The IOE has also put together a short piece featuring our latest Questioning Vaccination Discourse paper: www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/202...

I have written a piece for @theconversationuk.bsky.social about our study on a new form of vaccine scepticism: people questioning the status of some vaccines as vaccines, starting during the pandemic theconversation.com/its-not-a-va... @lancslinguistics.bsky.social @corpussocialsci.bsky.social

Pre-orders are crucial not just for writers but independent book shops, too. And in the post-twitter world people aren’t hearing as much about forthcoming books. So, a reminder: pre-order when you can, from independent bookshops, and have a nosey around bsky for your old bookish friends.

And here is the link to this one: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Can't quite believe I forgot! Definitely lost the posting habit over the last year or so...

Another 'Questioning Vaccination Discourses' paper is out! "‘It's a shot, not a vaccine like MMR’: A new type of vaccine-specific scepticism on Twitter/X during the COVID-19 pandemic" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... By @elenasemino.bsky.social @williamdance.bsky.social et al

Funded PhD opportunity at Lancaster: 'The sharing of personal lived experience by peer support workers working in mental health services in NHS, social care and third sector organisations.' Open to applicants with a background in Linguistics as well as Psychology www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

It seems like as good a day as any to repost links to the five metaphor-based animations we created - based on this paper journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... - about the importance of #vaccines. @sflusberg.bsky.social First one: A castle metaphor for how vaccines work youtu.be/DOD854panQg?...

Looking forward to welcoming both in person and online attendees to Lancaster for our 2025 health and science communication workshop series this March! We've got great speakers and fascinating topics lined up... For more information and to register, see: baalhealthsci.wordpress.com/2025/02/04/2...

Some very cool #healthcomm work from colleagues @ioe.bsky.social

I suppose one way to start here is to share a new publication. Here it goes: '‘I am still unsure’ - Spontaneous expressions of vaccine indecision on Mumsnet' with @vaclavbrezina.bsky.social @elenasemino.bsky.social @williamdance.bsky.social @drclaireh.bsky.social et al. #healthcomm #vaccinations