RA 3: Language, Culture and Education

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RA 3

RA 4

RA 5

RA 6

Exploring how language, communication, and education shape identities, power relations, creativity, and opportunities for social transformation

RA 3 Leads

KCL

Dr Olivia Knapton

E: olivia.knapton@kcl.ac.uk 

QMUL

Dr Sophie Holmes Elliot

E: s.holmes-elliott@qmul.ac.uk 

ICL

Dr Camile Kandiko Howson

E: c.howson@imperial.ac.uk 

About this Research Area

This Research Area examines the role of communication and creative production in shaping identities, institutions, and social life. Research investigates how language and discourse constitute political and cultural realities, whether through everyday interactions, media representations, or policy frameworks. By analysing the interplay among language, mind, and society, scholars explore how meaning is constructed and contested, how power is embedded in discourse, and how identities are negotiated across diverse contexts. Education is a core concern, with research extending from global and national education policy to pedagogy, assessment, and the teaching of STEM subjects.

Harnessing linguistic, cultural, and educational data to explore communication, identity, and learning.

Education, Mind & Society

This area pays close attention to how language mediates relationships among learners, teachers, and institutions, and how it both reflects and reinforces broader social inequalities. At the same time, it considers how language and cultural practices create possibilities for inclusion, creativity, and transformation. Sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cultural studies provide key methodological tools, while comparative approaches illuminate how local experiences of language and education connect with global processes. By linking linguistic, cultural, and educational inquiry, this Research Area offers critical insights into how communication and learning shape societies and foster cultural and intellectual development.

Data Statement

RA3 recognises a wide spectrum of data, with no hierarchy of value or sophistication: what matters is alignment with research aims and questions. Quantitative approaches may involve measuring brain activity through EEG or fMRI, analysing acoustic properties of speech, recording reaction times, or examining the frequency of linguistic features. In education, large-scale administrative records, assessment scores, questionnaires, and learning analytics often support experimental or statistical research.

Conversely, qualitative approaches may draw on ethnography, discourse or policy analysis, multimodal interpretation, and narrative accounts of classroom or community practice.

Methods of data collection are equally diverse, including experiments, surveys, tests, interviews, participant observation, timed classroom observations, and the analysis of texts, corpora, and visual media. In many projects, the same dataset may be analysed in multiple ways—for example, interview transcripts coded thematically or quantified for linguistic utterances—reflecting the interdisciplinary ethos of the field.

Research Students

Doctoral projects in RA3 are expected to combine robust research design with methodological rigour, whether using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approaches. Reflexivity and critical awareness are emphasised throughout, ensuring that students consider the assumptions underpinning their chosen methods and use diverse forms of evidence to advance understanding of language, culture, and education.

To find out more about our students and their research projects in this Research Area, please go to our Funded Students page and filter by Research Area.

You can find research project details on each student profile, where most students work on projects that they generate themselves.

View student profiles

Other Research Areas

RA 1

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RA 3

RA 4

RA 5

RA 6