Heat or Eat? Public Discourses of Food and Fuel Poverty from 2017-Today.

Leigh Harrington (University of Manchester) presents her research on the discourse of food poverty at the LEL departmental research seminar at the University of Manchester on 29 November 2022. Leigh explores a pilot studies which explore the representation of food poverty in UK newspapers between 2017-2022. Using a 2.1 million word corpus (FoodPov. Corpus), divided into Pre- and Since-COVID subcorpora, she focuses on the construction of two of the main actors in food poverty during this period, namely the UK government and those experiencing food poverty themselves. Using tools from corpus-assisted discourse analysis, especially collocation, I will illustrate how overall food poverty is framed as being a result of government inaction and is, subsequently, something that ordinary people are pulled into. The talk also looks ahead to the upcoming equivalent project on fuel poverty, by reporting early findings on the intersections between food poverty and other forms of poverty in the FoodPov. Corpus. The findings demonstrate both explicit references to other forms of poverty in the data, as well as evidence of more subtle linguistic coding.