iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Project SEMVARCOP

@semvarcop-project.bsky.social

"Semantic variation and communities of practice on social media". Universidad de Valladolid. PID2023-148324NB-I00 funded by @cienciagob PI: @laurafilardollamas.bsky.social

Posts Replies Media

Project SEMVARCOP @semvarcop-project.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

And here is the latest research by our team members on #humour, #onlinecommunities & #counterdiscourse

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Project SEMVARCOP @semvarcop-project.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Really happy to have hosted #CADAAD2026 as part of the activities in our research project! It was a great conference and we learnt a lot from the talks and plenaries! Now, are almost getting ready for the summer break...

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Project SEMVARCOP @semvarcop-project.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

We haven't published much these days, but we have been very busy. So here is a bit of what we have been doing... 1️⃣Very happy to host @pechersteph.bsky.social who is doing research with us for three months. 2️⃣We participated with two papers at the #EPICSXII conference held in Seville.

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Reposted by Project SEMVARCOP

CADAAD 2026 @cadaad2026.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Hi! Today we share the title and abstract of Heritage's #CADAAD2026 keynote presentation 🥳 See you in two weeks ☀️😎

CADAAD 2026 keynote speaker: title and abstract

Whose Voices Count? Using Corpora to Examine Trans Representation and Quotation Practices in the British Press between 2020 and 2025

Frazer Heritage

(Manchester Metropolitan University)

In May 2026, the UK Equalities and Human Rights Commission issued new guidance on the use of “single-sex spaces”, advocating a narrow and problematic definition of biological sex rather than gender identity. This guidance reflects a broader trend of legislation and institutional practices that increasingly restrict and undermine the rights of transgender people. Across the UK (and, indeed in comparable contexts), the media — and the financial networks supporting anti-trans campaigns — have played a central role in legitimising anti-trans discourse and contributing to the erosion of trans rights. Drawing on research conducted in collaboration with Amnesty International, this paper examines representations of trans people in four major British newspapers (The Sun, The Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph) on a month-by-month basis between January 2020 and April 2025. Building on previous work on trans representation in the British press (e.g. Baker, 2014; Gupta, 2019; Zottola, 2021), this study traces the development and circulation of anti-trans ideologies over time, while also exploring how corpus linguistic research can inform the work of organisations such as Amnesty International.

I demonstrate that reporting on trans people increased substantially across all publications during this period. However, this coverage consistently privileged the voices of politicians and anti-trans campaigners, while marginalising trans people and trans-rights advocacy groups. Corpus linguistic analysis further reveals that only two trans individuals are regularly named in reporting: a murdered teenage trans girl and a convicted felon. Alongside this, I identify growing frequencies of terms such as “gender critical” and “sex matters”, and examine how these labels function discursively to legitimise anti-trans actors and uncritically platform anti-trans hate groups. Ultimately, I identify a pattern whereby anti-trans voices are platformed, while those of trans people are silenced.

The paper situates these findings within the growing field of Trans linguistics (see Zimman, 2020; Zimman and Hayworth, 2020), while asking a broader methodological and ethical question: how can researchers centre trans voices when the data itself systematically excludes them?

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CADAAD 2026 @cadaad2026.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Continuing with the good news, we're very happy to announce that #CADAAD2026 will have two poster sessions 📜 right after lunch break 🍽️ on July 8th and 10th. ☝️🤨 you better be there or be square; you don't want to miss these amazing works and their authors!

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Reposted by Project SEMVARCOP

CADAAD 2026 @cadaad2026.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

⬇ down below you have a couple of snaps of Valladolid 📸 Enjoy them 😊

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Project SEMVARCOP @semvarcop-project.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Just a quick overview of who we are in the #SEMVARCOP research team: * Four university lecturers with different expertise on discourse analysis, rhetoric and cultural studies * Two Phd students writing their theses on digital discourse analysis. More info about us soon, when we finish our website

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Project SEMVARCOP @semvarcop-project.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

We'll introduce the team soon, and we are all very happy to be organizing #CADAAD2026 this year! More soon!

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Project SEMVARCOP @semvarcop-project.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

👋Welcome to our new account! 🤓 Here we will disseminate knowledge generated in the project #SEMVARCOP (PID2023-148324NB-10), funded by the Spanish Research Agency. 🔎In this project we study #affect & #identity in online Communities of practice by drawing on #CognitiveSociolinguistcs.

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