Energy discourses in Switzerland

Description

Issues surrounding the production, supply, and use of energy will be of concern to Switzerland in the next few years and the decades to come. In the project “Energy discourses in Switzerland”, researchers in the ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics are investigating the communicative prerequisites for the anticipated changes. The project, which will last three years from 2016-2019, will receive substantial support from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) under the Energy - Economy - Society (EES) research programme. The objective of the project is to identify how patterns of language use about energy issues in the three official Swiss languages (German, French, and Italian) develop across institutions, media, and societal sectors. The research is based on a large multilingual corpus of texts relevant to Swiss discourses on energy since 2011. The findings will be actively conveyed to various actors involved in the transition to sustainable energy systems and in the democratic dialogue about energy. This interdisciplinary project is led by members of the School of Applied Linguistics and its two Institutes (Maren Runte, head of the School’s corpus group; Peter Stücheli-Herlach, IAM, project spokesman; and Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, IUED).