Karine Collette

Karine Collette is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Sherbrooke, specializing in discourse analysis, literacy studies, and rhetorical theory. Her work bridges linguistic, sociocultural, and institutional perspectives on written and oral communication.

Education:

• Qualified for teaching-researcher functions by France's Conseil National des Universités (7th section: Language Sciences, Linguistics, Didactics)
• Ph.D. in Linguistics, Didactics, Semiotics
• Diplôme d'Études Supérieures Spécialisées in Training Engineering (Languages domain)

Research Focus: Her scholarship centers on socio-discursive dimensions of communication, including institutional discourse analysis (municipal documents, public administration), literacy pluralities in health/social services, and writing processes (rédactologie). She examines how power asymmetries manifest in administrative communications and develops socio-cognitive frameworks for understanding citizen-reader interactions.

Publication Trends: Recent work (2013-2014) reveals three dominant strands: 1) Health literacy and citizen rights in Quebec's social services, 2) Discursive analysis of the 2012 Maple Spring protests, and 3) Interdisciplinary methodological innovations in discourse studies. Her publications frequently appear in journals like Globe and Cahiers de recherche sociologique, often collaborating across linguistics, sociology, and health sciences.

Advising and Research Leadership: She supervises multiple discourse analysis projects and co-founded an interdisciplinary Quebec-wide research network. Her current work includes computerized discourse analysis at CATIFQ and studies of autobiographical health narratives. She has directed significant projects on immigrant family literacy and municipal document interpretation.

Research Infrastructure: Collette is deeply involved with CATIFQ (Centre d'Analyse et Traitement Informatique du Français Québécois) at Université de Sherbrooke and organizes international colloquia, including the 2015 "Discours hors-normes" conference. Her work integrates corpus linguistics with socio-cognitive approaches to examine how marginalized groups navigate institutional communications.