Bio keynote speakers

Tentative Title:

“We’d love to know what you think!”: Feedback Solicitations as Prospective Webcare

Camilla Vásquez is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of World Languages at the University of South Florida, where she teaches courses such as Digital Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics and Qualitative Research Methods. She is the author of The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Language, Creativity and Humour Online (Routledge, 2019). Her most recent edited volume is Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2022). Camilla’s research on digital business communication, online identities, and linguistic creativity has been published in venues such as Current Issues in Tourism, Food & Foodways, Intercultural Pragmatics, Internet Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Sociolinguistics and Narrative Inquiry. She currently serves as Associate Editor of Discourse Context & Media and is a co-editor (with Carmen Lee) of the Routledge book series Language and Digital Media.

Title of the talk to be announced

Ursula Lutzky is Associate Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She is a board member of the Association for Business Communication and coordinates activities for the region “Europe, Africa and Middle East” in her role as Regional Vice-President. Her research interests include business communication, discourse studies, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics. She therefore mainly investigates ‘language in use’ in a variety of contexts, such as customer communication, and the discursive effects that are created through the linguistic choices speakers and writers make. Her recent work has focused on the study of large corpora of digital discourse, such as blogs and microblogs. Her monograph, The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets (2021), explores the linguistic and communicative features used by companies and their customers when engaging in customer service interactions on Twitter.

Title of the talk to be announced

Dr. Marie-Louise Brunner is Tandem-Professor for Sustainability Communication at the Environmental Campus Birkenfeld, Trier University of Applied Sciences, where she is also on the board of directors of InDi - Institute for International and Digital Communication. As Project Leader for Sustainability Communication at the Europäische Akademie Otzenhausen gGmbH, she also works in an applied NGO context to round off the tandem-professorship. After having completed her B.A. and M.A. in English (with a focus on Linguistics and Culture Studies) and Intercultural Communication, she completed her PhD with distinction at Saarland University, Germany, on the topic "Understanding Intercultural Communication: Negotiating Meaning and Identities in English as a Lingua Franca Skype Conversations." Her research interests are in the areas of sustainability communication, social media, corporate identity, intercultural (business) communication, and language and food. Her research focus includes corpus-based multimodal discourse analysis, identity negotiation, communication strategies and optimization, and intercultural communication, among others.

Stefan Diemer is professor of International Communication and Digital Business and also holds associate professorships for corpus linguistics and English linguistics at Saarland University and Technical University Berlin, Germany. He is managing director of the InDi – Institute for International and Digital Communication at Trier University of Applied Sciences. His research interests include communication via social media, ELF, ELT, corpus linguistics, language and identity, and food discourse. He has published on verb-particle combinations in Old, Middle, and Modern English, intercultural Skype conversations, the linguistics of food, and language and the web. Currently, he is on research sabbatical and happily analyzing digital discourse across social media platforms and multimodal assessment in conversations over food.

Title of the talk:

Language in customer service: from webcare to chatbots

Dr Christine Liebrecht is assistant professor at Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, specifically Department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University (the Netherlands). Her research interests lie in the development of sustainable online relationships between different parties, such as organizations and consumers. She is an expert on electronic word-of-mouth, webcare, and chatbot communication that she examines by means of quantitative (corpus analyses and experimental studies) and qualitative (focus groups, interview studies) approaches. Christine publishes in peer-review journals such asJournal of Language and Social Psychology; Discourse, Context & Media; Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence,andJournal of Business Research.

Dr Charlotte van Hooijdonk is assistant professor at the department of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). She has various research interests, such as comprehensible patient-provide communication in pharmacies as well as online communication between customers and organizations (i.e., webcare and chatbot communication). Together with Christine Liebrecht, she developed a taxonomy to operationalize the conversational human voice in webcare communication.

As from 2020, Christine and Charlotte are PIs of the NWO-funded projectSmooth Operators, in which a team of scientists and private partners conducts research on customer service chatbots with a human touch to improve customers’ and employees’ collaboration and experience with AI.