Dr Frazer Heritage

A picture of Dr Heritage in graduation robes

Dr Frazer Heritage SFHEA

Senior Lecturer in Linguistics & Departmental ethics representative

he/they

My profile

Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics within the Department of Languages, Information and Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University. I am particularly interested in Corpus Linguistics, (Critical) Discourse Studies, Language, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, New Media Studies, and Videogame Discourse (Ludolinguistics). I have also done work on Critical Metaphor and Critical Metonymy analysis, and actively pursue work associated with Forensic Linguistics, Persuasion and Manipulation, Healthcare Discourse, and Metaphor Analysis. I have a background not only in Linguistics, but also in Psychology, Sociology, and Criminology. I regularly combine some of these disciplines as appropriate.  

My first monograph Language Gender and Videogames: Using Corpora to Analyse the Representation of Gender in Fantasy Videogames(Palgrave, 2021) built on the work I conducted during my PhD and used corpus linguistic methodologies to explore how gender was constructed in videogames. I have also since written about how players of video games talk about LGBTQ+ issues in gaming, as well as how people talk about videogames more broadly. In addition to my work on gender in videogames, I have recently won an internal research accelerator grant, which seeks to explore how identity is constructed within the videogame Sea of Thieves. More information on the project can be found on the Manchester Game Centre website.

More recently, I have published my second monograph Incels and Ideologies: Exploring How Incels Use Language to Construct Gender and Race (Palgrave, 2023). This book seeks to explore the language used by the online involuntary celibate community - a collection of anti-feminist and nihilistic men who are notorious for their problematic views about gender and race/ethnicity. In this book, I highlight some of the creative uses of language to construct such problematic ideologies and provide people with a “way in” to see how the community constructs different social actors, and have community-specific language for these social actors. 

Outside of these areas, I was the lead editor on Analysing Representation: A Corpus and Discourse Textbook(Routledge, 2024) - co-edited with Professor Charlotte Taylor (University of Sussex). This textbook was been written by multiple experts in corpus linguistics and discourse studies and will provide students with a range of tools for exploring how different forms of media represent different concepts. 

I am currently affiliated with the Manchester Centre for Research in Linguistics (MCRL) and the Manchester Game Centre. In addition to leading the Social Media strategy for MCRL, I am also the Department (Linguistics) lead for ethics and sit on the Athena Swan Self-Assessment Team. I will soon be taking up a new role as liaison for the Emotional Intelligence Agency MA programmes. 

I regularly teach on the Undergraduate degree schemes as well as the post-graduate degrees. I am currently open to PhD applications within my specialist areas. 

In addition to this academic work, I am currently the secretary for the British Association of Applied Linguists’ Language, Gender, and Sexuality Special Interest Group (BAAL’s LGaS SIG). I am also the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies and regularly review for multiple Q1 journals. I also regularly do outreach talks for police and security forces, schools, and gaming companies. If you represent a similar organisation and would like me to come and discuss any of my specialist areas, please do get in touch. 

Interests and expertise

Corpus Linguistics

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS)

Language, Gender, and Sexuality

Ludolinguistics (Language and Gaming)

Language and New Media

Health Communication (particularly around sexuality)

Metaphor and Metonymy

Get in touch

5.10 Grosvenor East Building

Projects

Corpora and Videogames and Language, Equality, and Gaming

Two similar projects I am currently conducting are those related to corpus approaches to the language used in videogames. And the internally funded Language, Equality, and Gaming (LEG) project. Examples of collaborations related to this theme include:

  • Examining corpus and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of instructions in videogames
  • Exploring the construction of identity in Sea of Thieves
  • Developing EDI training materials for videogame companies

Teaching

I have a varied experience of (co-)leading units at MMU. This includes the following Undergraduate unit (note, units with an asterisk are set to be lead in 2024/25):

Level 4:

Discourse Analysis* 

Semantics*

Level 5: 

Variationist sociolinguistics

Level 6:

Language and Power*

Language Attitudes

Business Communication*

In addition to this teaching, I regularly contribute guest lectures to other Undergraduate and Postgraduate units. 

Courses

BA (Hons)

English Language and Linguistics

Undergraduate
BA (Hons)

English Language and Linguistics (with a modern language)

Undergraduate
MA

Applied Linguistics

Postgraduate

Supervision

In addition to supervising Undergraduate and Masters dissertations on a range of topics, I currently supervise the following students at MMU:

Ffion Brown - The language of masculinity and mental health

In addition to this, I also supervise the following external PhD students:

Keiron Oakland (BCU) - Exploring toxicity in competitive e-sports gaming cultures 

Bryony Hodgetts (BCU) - Investigating police meta-linguistic understanding of incel discourse in comparison to naturalistic incel discourse, specifically around the language of emotions

Serena Cecchini (University of Naples) - Corpus approaches to language and gaming

Research outputs

Monograph(s)

Heritage, F. (2021). Language, Gender, and Videogames: Using Corpora to Analyse the Representation of Gender in Videogames. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Heritage, F. (2023). Incels and ideologies: how incels use language to represent gender and race. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Edited Collection(s)

Heritage, F. & Taylor, C. (Eds.) (2024). Analysing representation: A Corpus and Discourse Textbook. London: Routledge.

Papers and book chapters (including forthcoming)

Heritage, F. (forthcoming). The representation of men and masculinity in The Witcher videogame series. In R. Lawson (Ed.), Digital Masculinities. Oxford University Press.

Heritage, F. (forthcoming). “Plow her well, show her you’re a man”: Language, sex, and heteronormativity from a diachronic perspective in The Witcher. In M.Wysocki and S. Shook (Eds.) Handbook of Games and Sex/Sexuality. Bloomsbury.

Heritage, F. (forthcoming). “this sub is the closest thing I have to a friend”: looking at how incels construct a support network to attract new members. In D. Dayter and S. Rüdiger (Eds.), Language, Persuasion, and Manipulation. Cambridge University Press.

Heritage, F. (forthcoming). Support Networks and Whisper Channels: Dealing with Difficult Data and (Potential) Collaborators. In S. Mcculloch (Ed.) Novice LGBTQ+ scholarly publishing. Routledge.

Heritage, F. & Humphries, C. (2024). Are videogames represented as violent in the press? Hypothesis testing using MD-CADS and corpora from UK newspapers in 2000 and 2020. Corpora 19(2).

Taylor, C.and Heritage, F. (2024). Introduction. In F. Heritage and C. Taylor, (Eds.) (2024) Analysing Representation: A corpus and discourse textbook. Routledge

Heritage, F. (2023). Positionality in a contemptuous time: Ethical considerations and discussions on researching language, gender, and sexuality. Zeitschrift fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik: a quarterly of language, literature and culture. 341-351

Bogetić, K., Heritage, F., Koller, V., and McGlashan, M. (2023). Landwhales, femoids and sub-humans: Dehumanising metaphors in incel discourse. Metaphor and the Social World 13(2).

Heritage, F. (2022). Name that community? Critical reflections on the ethics about disseminating research into online fetish communities. Journal of Positive Sexuality 8(2), pp. 23-30.

Heritage, F. (2022). Public and Private Discourses of Lesbians: Exploring the Discourses Surrounding Lesbians in the Spoken BNC2014 and the British Press. Journal of Corpora And Discourse Studies (JCADS) 5(1), pp.61-89.

Heritage, F. (2022). Magical women: Representations of female characters in the Witcher video game series. Discourse Context and Media 49. 100627. Open access: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2022.100627

Heritage, F. (2022). Review of Bernaisch, T. (Ed.) Gender in world Englishes. Journal of English Linguistics 50(3), pp. 315-323.

Heritage, F. (2022). Review of Brown, J. Love, sex, gender, and superheroes. Gender and Language, 16(2), pp.1-3.

Heritage, F. (2022). Politics, pronouns, and the players: Examining how videogame players react to the inclusion of a transgender character in World of Warcraft. Gender and Language, 16(1), pp.26–51.

Baker, P. and Heritage, F. (2021). Corpus Approaches to Sociolinguistics. In A. O’Keefe and M. McCarthy (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (2nd ed) (pp. pp. 562-575). London: Routledge.

Heritage, F. and Baker, P. (2021).Crime or culture? Representations of chemsex in the British press and magazines aimed at GBTQ+ men. Critical Discourse Studies. Advanced Online publication: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405904.2021.1910052

Heritage, F. (2020). Applying corpus linguistics to videogame data: Exploring the representation of gender in videogames at a lexical level. Game studies, 20(3). Available: http://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/heritage_frazer

Heritage F. and Koller, V. (2020). Incels, in-groups, and ideologies: the representation of gendered social actors in a sexuality-based online community. Language and Sexuality 9 (2), pp.153-180

Heritage, F. (2020). Review of Russel, Eric. (2019) The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia. Discourse and Society 31(4), pp. 448-450.

Heritage, F. (2019). Review of Cameron, Deborah. And Shaw, Sylvia (2016) Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election. Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan. Journal of Language and Politics 18(4), pp. 642-645.

Heritage, F. (2015). Disney Princesses and the Diachronic Change of Culturally Gendered Language. In P. Clements, A. Krause, & H. Brown (Eds.), JALT2014: Conversations Across Borders (pp. 307-318). Japanese Association for Language Teaching.