Ziwei Liu

I am a PhD student in the department of Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies. With a deep interest in ecological issues and animal protection, my research mainly focuses on Ecolinguistics and environmental discourse analysis. My current research is a corpus-based cross-linguistic study on the representation of environmental crises (e.g., climate change) and animals facing extinction (e.g., polar bears) in the mainstream news media in Canada and China. By investigating the ideologies inherent in the representation of the ecological issues and their related animals, my research aims to contribute to our understanding of the discursive strategies used in constructing ‘destructive discourses’—discourses that may cause potential damage to our ecosystem—and thereby mitigating their ruinous consequences for our ecosystem and animals.

Areas of Interest

• Ecolinguistics
• Environmental Discourse Analysis
• Corpus Linguistics