Chrystie Myketiak

Dr Chrystie Myketiak is a political discourse analyst who examines language in use in order to uncover what its form, function, and structure tells us about interaction, structural inequalities, and the covert values and beliefs within a culture. Her research interests are in power and justice; gender, sexualities, desire; intersectionality; violence; social norms; sociocultural theories (specifically, feminist and queer theories); mediated communication.

Chrystie's specialist research is in three areas, with each strand combining her general interests. The first addresses talk about sex, sexuality and desire as social forces through the investigation of conversations in a technologically-mediated community; the monograph, Online Sex Talk and the Social World (Palgrave, "Studies on Language, Gender, and Sexuality"), culminates her work in this area. In order to support her writing of this book, the University of Brighton awarded her a Sabbatical Award. Chrystie's second strand of research is an intersectional discourse analysis of texts produced by mass shooters, which focuses on how the desire-centred discourse strategies used by the offenders attempt to legitimate structural inequalities and construct normative identities. This research will be published in the book Discourse, Demand, Desire: An Intersectional Analysis of Mass Shooter Texts (Palgrave). Her third body of research began as a discursive-pragmatic analysis of medical errors and the construction of accountability in medical error news reporting and clinical incident reporting; she is currently expanding her work on accountability in new directions. 

A single overarching question led Chrystie to study and work across the humanities and social sciences: how do interaction and social structures work together to reproduce or alternatively challenge structural inequalities? This focus combined with a commitment to undoing structural harms as they manifest in language use and communication is key to her research, teaching, and leadership. 

Chrystie supervises six PhD students and has three PhD student completions. She is happy to be contacted by prospective students who plan to investigate politics and discourse, likely through discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, queer linguistics, conversation analysis, or multimodal discourse analysis. 

Broad areas of inquiry might include (and overlap on):

• desire and pleasure
• gender and sexualities
• power, violence, and justice
• politics of language/political language
• identities and intersectionality
• norms and belonging