Lauren Alex O'Hagan

I am a Research Fellow in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University and an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University.

I am an experienced sociolinguist who specialises in the study of objects of visual and material culture from the theoretical perspective of visual social semiotics and the methodological framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis. While my research encompasses different historical periods, geographical settings and subjects, it is united by the following three objectives that have run throughout all my work to date:

- Tracing the cultural biographies of everyday objects and investigating their sociocultural forms and functions, as well as acts of semiotic remediation by their owners

- Challenging the ‘novelty’ of contemporary communicative practices by situating them within a more extensive lineage of practice and identifying (dis)continuities in their uses, purposes and meaning potentials

- Fostering new understandings of identity construction and stereotyping, particularly in terms of social class and Irishness, and the ideological values, power relations and political orientations that shape such meanings in discourse

These three objectives have the broader aim of reappraising the life of a particular person/group of people or event, addressing misconceptions or biases in their depiction to date and establishing the historical rationale behind this depiction and how language and other semiotic resources (e.g. image, colour, typography, layout, composition) work together to ‘legitimise’ it.

Some of the artefacts that my research has explored are: book inscriptions, food advertisements, political postcards and posters, pigeon photography, drone photography, hardtack biscuits, dip pens, battle jackets, music memorabilia, public monuments and plaques, sheet music covers, greeting cards, school exercise books, birthday books and book bindings/covers.

A major strand of my recent work centres on the life, legacy and cultural reception of Irish blues-rock musician Rory Gallagher. My research has examined the material, semiotic and affective dimensions of Gallagher’s artistic footprint, ranging from fan keepsakes and digital communities to media portrayals and commemorative landscapes. Central to this is a reappraisal of Gallagher’s later years through Rewriting Rory, a widely respected blog I curate that challenges reductive portrayals of his final decade, offering a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of his life and work during this period.

In line with its emphasis on the social practices, processes and people involved in the production or reception of objects of visual/material culture, my research often stretches the boundaries of traditional multimodal analysis through its co-application with archival research (multimodal ethnohistory), object-oriented interviews (multimodal ethnography) and autoethnography (multimodal autoethnography). This facilitates a transhistorical perspective that identifies antecedents in the communicative histories of individuals and communities that shape a text’s creation.