Plenary sessions

Helen Caple is Associate Professor in Journalism at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Helen’s research interests centre on news photography, text-image relations in new and old media, discursive news values analysis, and visual-verbal representations of diversity. As an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow (2016-2019), Helen examined the impact of ongoing disruptions on photojournalism and visual news storytelling practices in Australian news media organisations. Key publications emanating from this research include: Photojournalism Disrupted: The View from Australia (2019 – Routledge); Multimodal News Analysis Across Cultures (2020 - Cambridge University Press) with Changpeng Huan & Monika Bednarek; and the edited volume Shifts towards Image-Centric Practices in the Contemporary Media Sphere (2020 – Routledge) with Hartmut Stöckl & Jana Pflaeging. Helen is also the co-author (with Monika Bednarek) of The Discourse of News Values (2017, Oxford University Press), which offers a comprehensive examination of the visual and verbal construal of news values from a discursive perspective. Helen uses the pronouns she/her.

Silvia Pessoa in a Teaching Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar where she teaches courses in academic and professional writing, sociolinguistics, and immigration and researches disciplinary writing using SFL. Originally from Uruguay, Pessoa completed her doctorate degree at Carnegie Mellon University in which she studied biliteracy development among undocumented Uruguayan adolescent immigrants in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In Qatar, she works with disciplinary faculty to scaffold writing across the curriculum through writing workshops that make writing expectations explicit for students. Her work has appeared in various journals including the Journal of Second Language Writing, English for Specific Purposes, and Journal of English for Academic Purposes. She is Associate Editor for Linguistics and Education.