@gavinlamb.org
sociolinguist: conservation, tourism, environmental communication, climate knowledge networks, sea turtles & seals🐢🦭| Associate Professor @NHH | Researcher @NORCE | PhD @uhmanoa | new book: multispecies discourse analysis
If you know a high school student interested in language and/or puzzles, tell 'em about the linguistics olympiads, there are lots of national versions in many countries plus an international competition!
2025 was a difficult year for conservation, but scientists, activists, and communities continue the struggle — and their stories hint at a brighter future.
Here’s a sample of notable environmental books published this year. Views in books are the authors’, not necessarily Mongabay’s.
Happy to have published two out of this year's top ten most read posts on Language on the Move.
Listening to all the podcast episodes has also been a highlight of my year. Check them out!
So happy that my paper with Philip Leifeld, “Up and Down With… Polarisation? Intrinsic and Instrumental Polarisation Dynamics in US Climate Policy Debates,” is included in this issue. The topic is particularly relevant now www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandg...
🐬 Can friendship slow ageing?
In wild bottlenose dolphins, strong social relationships aren’t just important for social life — they may actually influence biological ageing.
@liviagerber.bsky.social
#ScienceCommunication #MarineMammals #Ageing #MAVELab
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Good starter packs circulating here on science and environment
Open PhD position in Political Science with specialization in political economy and political behavior at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Details below:
web103.reachmee.com/ext/I005/10...
Hard to overstate how concerning this is. There are over 46,000 people, a school, and a hospital in the flash flood warning area. Washington communities have been bracing for levee failures as another round of atmospheric rivers arrives to full rivers and saturated soils.
Fig. 1. Spectrograms and oscillograms of (A) two meows and (B) two purrs. Oscillograms depict sound pressure over time, and spectrograms depict frequency over time. All spectrograms were created with a 1024-point FFT, 16-bit depth, and a Hamming Window with 87.5% overlap (sampling rate: 96 kHz, frequency resolution: 94 Hz, time resolution: 1.33 ms). The two pictures on the right depict Koda, a 15-year-old male Ragdoll cat, meowing and purring (credit: Marisa Idolo).
what's in a meow?? 🐈
New from @berlinbatlab.bsky.social!
1. "we examined meows and purrs to establish how individual identity is encoded"
2. stronger individual signature in purrs than in meows
3. domestic cat meows more variable than those of wild felids
#bioacoustics
#prattle 💬
#neuroskyence
part 2 of this book has several chapters worth checking out on histories of environmental movements in Hawai‘i. www.dukeupress.edu/a-nation-ris...
Working on #CriticalDiscourseStudies?
⌛The deadline for abstract submission to #CADAAD2026 is fast approaching!
🔽
www.cadaad2026.com/138021/detai...
@cadaad.bsky.social @cadaad-journal.bsky.social
Animal-Computer Interaction: The emergence of a discipline www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
in case you weren't aware of r/petswithbuttons!🐈 "My cat has started to use 'vacuum' as a curse word": "For example, he will ask for "snackie” when we JUST got done with snackie and I will say “snackie all done” and then he will go spam the vacuum button."
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72193...
Oh, seeing now that Kai Erikson passed away last month. “Everything in its Path” was really formative to me early on in grad school, and when I decided to study Paradise after the Camp Fire. It’s probably become more relevant than even he could have imagined…an important legacy to leave behind.
New report from Eurocities "While most cities rely on municipal revenue (87%) and EU funding (83%) for climate adaptation, only around 50% have or are developing a dedicated financing strategy. Alarmingly, 28% said national or local regulations prevent them from accessing certain types of funding."
Interesting new free course in ecolinguistics & environmental communication from UN SDG:Learn!🌿: The Search for New Stories to Live By: Econarrative and Ethical Leadership
www.unsdglearn.org/courses/the-...
"Deborah Cameron, former professor of language and communication at Oxford university, said using terms for staff that are “so out of step with what most people think your business is” risked attracting “incomprehension or ridicule”.
www.ft.com/content/6689...
My advisee Milo Watson just had his essay published by ISLE as an advance article! It’s a great piece on field guides: how they traditionally worked as a genre and how the genre is changing to address ongoing ecological catastrophe. Currently open access—check it out! #envhum
"During the next year AI LEARN will be hiring approximately 25 PhD, Postdoc, and Researcher positions in a variety of fields at locations: NTNU (Trondheim, Norway), University of Bergen (Bergen, Norway), University of Oslo (Oslo, Norway), and the University of Murcia (Murcia Spain)."
Scientists explore underwater calls of Hawaiian monk seals: “We found that wild Hawaiian monk seals are producing lots of vocalizations all of the time,” said Kirby Parnell, a PhD candidate with the Marine Mammal Research Program."
Reading today!📚 "In River Life and the Upspring of Nature Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh." #ethnography
"when subsequently forming advice on the topic based on their search, those who learn from LLM syntheses (vs. traditional web links) feel less invested in forming their advice, and, more importantly, create advice that is sparser, less original and ultimately less likely to be adopted by recipients"
"Can AI translate Native languages in times of disaster?
In the wake of Typhoon Halong, an AI language company wants to hire Native translators, raising questions about data sovereignty."
reminded me of this story from a few years ago: "Understandably, not everyone is excited about an Italian version of a grizzly bear showing up in their backyard, and a team of carefully selected “bear ambassadors” works hard to convince locals of the value of their polarizing neighbor."
"Experts have attributed the rise in attacks partly to climate change, with storms wreaking havoc on vegetation like beech trees, which produce the nuts that bears depend on. Bears have grown increasingly brazen in their quest for calories, venturing into urban centers in search of scraps."
My colleague Marie-Theres Fojuth has advertised a fully funded 3-year PhD Fellowship in Museum Education @unistavanger.bsky.social with the «Into the Fjords: Blue Museums as Arenas of Learning about Vulnerable Ecosystems (FJORDS)» project. Perfect for Scandinavian-speaking #envhum #envhist people!
LMU Munich offers a funded PhD position for three years at the Graduate School of Language & Literature. The deadline for applications is 7 December 2025:
www.en.lipp.uni-muenchen.de/application/...
Job!📣 "The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley invites applications for a two-year postdoctoral scholar position. The postdoc will contribute to an NSF-funded project on the politics of digitizing newly-invented writing systems"
