In Treatments, Lisa Diedrich considers illness narratives, demonstrating that these texts not only recount and interpret symptoms but also describe illness as an event that reflects wider cultural contexts, including race, gender, class, and sexuality. Diedrich begins this theoretically rigorous analysis by offering examples of midcentury memoirs of tuberculosis. She then looks at Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “White Glasses,” showing how these breast cancer survivors draw on feminist health practices of the 1970s and also anticipate the figure that would appear in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—the “politicized patient.”

The way we interpret language depends on where the words we are reading are placed in the world. Discourses in Place explores how the physical and material characteristics of language in the world give meaning to communication. In the book Ron and Suzanne Scollon argue that we can only interpret the meaning of public texts like road signs, notices and brand logos by considering the world and culture that surrounds them. Drawing on a wide range of real examples, from signs in the Chinese mountains to urban centers in Europe, Asia and America, the book equips students with the methodology and models they need to undertake their own research in "geosemiotics," this key interface between semiotics and intercultural communication.

Utilizing a historical and international approach, this valuable two-volume resource makes even the more complex linguistic issues understandable for the non-specialized reader. Containing over 500 alphabetically arranged entries and an expansive glossary by a team of international scholars, the Encyclopedia of Linguistics explores the varied perspectives, figures, and methodologies that make up the field.
The Encyclopedia contains four types of entries to thoroughly discuss the different elements of linguistics.