Hi, I'm Katharine Kavanagh, from the
Center for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University.
I'm in the first year of my PhD, and my research is about circus.
More specifically it's
about representation. So in my title
'What's so special about the circus?', the
important part is 'And who says so'.
My two groups of key stakeholders are circus professionals and circus audience members
and that relationship is
mediated by public texts.
Most people in the UK will have more familiarity with circus performance
through its representation in popular culture and
media sources,
rather than first-hand experience of attendance
but in recent years the circus field has been rapidly expanding and diversifying.
For people whose livelihood depends upon audience custom,
it's important that the representations available to potential audience members
reflect the experience that they're likely to receive.
Because studies have shown that audience members are not likely to re-attend an event type
unless their expectations are met
the first time around.
The most direct form of mediation in the producer- consumer relationship comes from
promotional texts. So my main research
question is 'How can the interests of
potential audience members and circus
professionals be better served by
promotional texts?' And to answer that I
have to understand what audience members
value about their experience of
attending a circus production and
whether those values are represented in
the legitimized institutional texts that
supposedly promote the experience.
Promotional texts are made up of the
interested genre of publicity blurbs and the
disinterested genre of reviews. Reviews,
from the perspective of circus
professionals tend to lack relevant
knowledge and content. I want to compare
the audience perspective. So I'll be
collecting a corpus of transcripts of
audience interviews that I'll be
conducting next summer and a corpus of
promotional texts made up of a subcorpus of reviews and a corresponding
subcorpus of marketing blurbs. These will
account for all the circus productions
covered in the UK between February 2019
January 2020. My findings will
triangulate two analyses across the
corpora. I'll use the UCREL Semantic
Analysis System to identify key semantic
domains which are given relative
attention in each corpus - and this will
be a marker of where value is
communicated through visibility or
invisibility. Value is also realised in
texts as evaluation, which is a key
function of promotional genres. So I'll
use Martin and White's APPRAISAL
framework to identify targets of
evaluation (that is, the phenomena being
evaluated) and the way they are
relatively distributed. Any gaps that are
revealed in the corpora also reveal gaps
in the mediated relationship between
circus producers and circus audiences.
Revealing the gaps is the first step
towards creating more effective
communicative bridges to better serve
the livelihoods and the leisure time of
my key stakeholders. Thank you, I look
forward to answering any questions in
the comments
