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Mike Pearce has written a comment piece for the website of The Northern Correspondent . You can read it here .

It's been three years since the first post on the Department of Culture Research Blog. Thirty thousand hits later we're still going strong, showcasing the range of high-quality research and scholarship in the department. Many thanks to all those who have contributed - keep it coming!

In an article published in the journal Sociolinguistic Studies, Dr Michael Pearce   considers how the technological advances associated with Web 2.0 allow people to interact in online ‘communities’ built around shared interests and concerns. Michael's article examines an online messageboard virtually located in North East England, and explores the ways in which participants’ beliefs about and attitudes towards sociolinguistic variation emerge through discourse. He focuses on a single ‘conversation’ about the sociolinguistic variable mam/mum , revealing the language ideologies which inform the sociolinguistic awareness of participants, and concludes by using the concept of ‘late modernity’ as an interpretive frame to help understand what is happening as people appropriate a global technology for local social action. Pearce, M. 2015.  Mam or mum? Sociolinguistic awareness and language-ideological debates online . Sociolinguistic Studies , 9 (1): 115-135.

Dr Mike Pearce has been invited to speak at 'The North and Northness: Ideas of Place, Locatedness and Regions.' This half-day event organized by the Cultural Significance of Place (CSoP) interdisciplinary research group at Newcastle University, takes place on Friday 29th May 2015 . Mike's paper is entitled 'Anyone from the north east who says 'Mum' should be shot'.  The event will explore varying understandings of the North, as constructed and applied over a range of disciplines, and consider the role ‘Northness’ has played in the evolution of ideas of place, locatedness and regions. Further details can be found here .

The English Research Seminar on Wednesday 6th May will be given by Professor Abdur Raheem Kidwai from Aligarh Muslim University, India. His paper is entitled '"The Challenging Gaze": Islam/Muslims in Today's Globalized World in Qaisra Shahraz's novel Revolt ' (2013). Based in Manchester, UK, Qaisra Shahraz, of Pakistani descent, seeks to recontextualize Islam with modernity in her fiction. While displaying a nuanced understanding of today’s challenges, her novels are embedded in the Islamic value system. This amalgam between tradition and modernity, especially in the context of gender parity in Muslim society is a new, interesting aspect of the discourse. All staff and students are welcome to the talk, which starts at 5pm in Priestman 313.

What are the origins and history of the ethnonym Geordie in North East England? How does this history – which according to some authorities has never adequately been explained – help us to understand its current usage and meanings? In an article published in Names: A Journal of Onomastics , Dr Michael Pearce attempts to answer these questions by drawing on evidence from a range of sources (including newly-available material in the British Newspaper Archive). Pearce, M. 2015. 'The Ethnonym Geordie in North East England.' Names: A Journal of Onomastics 63 (2): 75-85.

Dr Laura O'Brien has published an essay entitled “La moralité des mouchards: Chenu, de la Hodde et la guerre des pamphlets” [The morality of informers: Chenu, de la Hodde and the war of pamphlets]. Her work, which appears in Morales en révolutions: France, 1789-1940 (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, April 2015) discusses the multifaceted ideas of ‘morality’ in a series of extremely critical contemporary ‘histories’ of the French revolution of 1848, written in 1849 and 1850 by two former police informers and intended to damage the legacy of both the revolution and 1848’s revolutionaries.