Alexis Black

I am currently a doctoral candidate under the direction of Christine Jourdan at Concordia University in Montréal and pleased to be the Communications Coordinator for the LingAnthLing interest group.  My research is rooted in cognitive linguistics and anthropology and examines how metaphors operate when communicating the unknown and how metaphors facilitate the construction of conceptions on the edge of reality.  I am examining this process by conducting an ethnographic and discursive study of francophone discourse concerning sustained extra-planetary human existence.  I find extra-planetary human existence a particularly appropriate topic for analysis of the relation of metaphor to imagination and reality because it is a complete unknown.  I am currently working on an article concerning the deployment of metaphors in simulated extra-planetary environments (e.g. The Mars Desert Research Station) and have a forthcoming article mapping metaphors in francophone obituaries in the Québec Studies Journal.