Maka Julios-Costa

Email: maria.julioscosta@lancaster.ac.uk

Twitter Handle – @JuliosMaka

Professional Websites:

www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about-us/people/maria-julios-costa

www.linkedin.com/in/makajulios-costa

Previous Education

10/2017–Present. PhD Linguistics. Project: Mediated Contact and the Mitigation of Outgroup Prejudice: A longitudinal study of media discourse, the modulation of national identity threat and anti-immigrant bias.

10/2012 – 07/2014. M.A. Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University. Grade obtained: Distinction. (Part-time basis). Master’s thesis: Sixteen going on criminal – Exploring the discursive constructions of young offenders and their impact on cognition. A critical and experimental study.

03/2007 – 04/2011. B.A. Applied Linguistics (TESOL), Universidad de Montevideo (Uruguay). First-class degree (GPA: 11.1/12). Dissertation: Reading into Students’ Minds: a second language assessment tool for enhancing lower-level processes in reading comprehension.

Thesis title

Mediated Contact and the Mitigation of Outgroup Prejudice: A longitudinal study of media discourse, the modulation of national identity threat and anti-immigrant bias. Insights from ERP and Critical-Discourse Analysis.

Supervisors

Professor Chris Hart

Research Summary

My research focus lies at the intersection of language, social cognition and intergroup behaviour. I am particularly interested in exploring the cognitive and emotional bases of language, ideology, discrimination and social policies through discourse-analytical and experimental methods from social neuroscience and social psychology. Throughout, I mainly subscribe to a cognitive-linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and work to advance the application of experimental approaches in CDA.

As part of my doctoral project I am interested in charting the relationship between language and intergroup conflict at multiple levels (sociocultural, psychological and physiological). More specifically, I study how mediated contact with social narratives of outgroups (rather than with outgroups themselves) impacts processes of social categorisation, empathy and identity formation. In one guise, I pay special attention to how groups and institutions, particularly news media outlets, structure their linguistic behaviours in normalising their particular worldviews and legitimising discriminatory attitudes and practices towards ethnic minorities and so-called “outgroups”. At the same time, I work to find new avenues into the modulation of prejudice towards these groups, by identifying ways in which news media and political institutions can modify their linguistic behaviours to contribute to the reduction of prejudice, rather than to its proliferation.

Research interests

Critical Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, Social Neuroscience, Ideology, Group Identity, Immigration, Emotion, Intergroup Relations.

Publication

Julios-Costa, M. (2017). The age of crime: A cognitive-linguistic critical discourse study of media representations and semantic framings of youth offenders in the Uruguayan media. Discourse & Communication, 11(4), 362–385. doi:10.1177/1750481317707378