Academic interests
The focus of my research is on figurative language and thought in multimodal discourse. I am currently investigating the roles of metaphor and metonymy in shaping attitudes and emotions towards the climate crisis and related environmental issues. I am interested in how figurative combinations of images and words are used to construct awareness-raising and activist discourses in particular, the affective and evaluative dimensions of visual and multimodal metaphoric frames, and how these can impact the ways individuals reason about and respond to specific environmental issues such as plastic pollution. Another key focus of my research is on the critical and cognitive functions of creative uses of metonymy and irony in discourses of climate protests.
My general research interests lie within cognitive linguistic and critical approaches to discourse analysis, multimodality, emotions, cross-linguistic comparisons, experimental methods and language and creativity.
Background
2019-2020: MA, English Applied Linguistics, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain)
2013-2017: BA(Hons), English and French, University of Exeter (UK)
Conferences
O'Dowd, N. A., & Šarić, L. (2024, March 18). “Hope, like a slinky, springs eternal”: A comparative analysis of metaphorical conceptualisations of hope/nada in Anglophone and Croatian online discourses about climate change. CILC6 – Modes of Existence in the Anthropocene, Oslo, Norway.
O’Dowd, N. A. (2023, June 29). The potential of creative uses of metonymy for climate protest. Research and Applying Metaphor Conference (RaAM16), Alcalá de Henares, Spain.
O’Dowd, N. A. (2022, August 18). Plastic hearts: The emotional and framing impact of multimodal metaphor & metonymy in campaigns about ocean plastic. 8th International Conference of the Scandinavian Association for Language and Cognition 8 (SALC8), Turku, Finland.
Hidalgo-Downing, L., & O’Dowd, N. A. (2021, June 26). Multimodal metaphtonymy in non-commercial advertising and posters on climate change and environmental awareness. Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference (RaAM14), Vilnius, Lithuania.