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Alexa Hepburn is professor of communication at Rutgers University, and honorary professor in conversation analysis in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University.
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Alexa Hepburn is professor of communication at Rutgers University, and honorary professor in conversation analysis in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University.
Hepburn was born in Leicester. Because her father was a telecoms engineer she moved between twelve different schools in the North of England and Scotland.[ citation needed ] She did an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Dundee. [1] She did her PhD at Glasgow Caledonian University supervised by Gerda Siann. This focused on school bullying, with a particular interest in the way that traditional research had isolated pupils and their problematic personalities, rather than seeing them as part of a broader system of relationships, including teachers and parents. This was combined with a poststructuralist approach to psychological methods, to power, and to the nature of persons.[ citation needed ]
Hepburn was awarded her PhD in 1995 and she held teaching positions at Napier University, Staffordshire University and then Nottingham Trent University. After being a Leverhulme Fellow in 2002 she was appointed to a lectureship and then senior lectureship at Loughborough University. In 2009 she was promoted to Reader in Conversation Analysis, and in 2015 to Professor of Conversation Analysis. In September 2015 she took up a position of Research Professor in the Communication Department at Rutgers University.https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/hepburn-alexa
Her early research combined her interests in critical psychology and theory with an empirical examination of school bullying. She explored the relationship between Derrida's deconstruction and the nature of psychology and considered the implications of relativism for feminism. Her work was influenced by, and influenced, the approach known as discursive psychology.
Her critical concerns were brought together in her Introduction to Critical Social Psychology published in 2003. This integrated and evaluated critical work inspired by Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism and discourse analysis.
In the years after this she was heavily involved in editing two collections jointly with Sally Wiggins, one a special issue of the journal Discourse and Society and the other a volume for Cambridge University Press, Discursive Research in Practice.
From 2005 she has undergone extensive training in conversation analysis, attending workshops taught by Emanuel Schegloff, John Heritage and Gene Lerner in UCLA and masters level modules in conversation analysis at the University of York taught by Celia Kitzinger.
Since 2000 she has been working with a large corpus of phone calls to the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children child protection helpline, originally collected as part of her Leverhulme Fellowship. Her work focused on the way the calls are opened, the way emotion is expressed and responded to, and the way shared understandings are developed and contested in the course of sequences of advice. This programme of work has resulted in a series of articles. Much of this work is collaborative with Jonathan Potter.
She has become expert in transcription and has developed Gail Jefferson's basic system for transcribing talk to encompass phenomena associated with crying and upset (sobbing, sniffing, tremulous delivery). This is part of a broader concern with the way emotion becomes something live in interaction.
Her work has focused on interaction in family mealtimes involving young children. This involved video recordings of meals and studying basic actions such as requests, directives, admonishments and threats.[ citation needed ]
In addition to these topics she has been involved in a series of studies of the role of tag questions in interaction. Her focus has been on the way tag questions can be used to both build and contest intersubjectivity.
She has also been working on technical features of indexical repair - conversational moments where speakers 'fix' their own talk before another speaker can take their turn.[ citation needed ]
A joint paper in 2022 looked at the different meanings of the word "right" when used by speakers in the UK and the US. [2]
In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our world experience. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics. In these expressions, ' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context.
Jacques Derrida was a French Algerian philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disavowed the word "postmodernity".
Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that investigates the methods members use to achieve mutual understanding through the transcription of naturally occurring conversations from audio or video. It focuses on both verbal and non-verbal conduct, especially in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with a focus on casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors' offices, courts, law enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media, and focus on multimodal and nonverbal activity in interaction, including gaze, body movement and gesture. As a consequence, the term conversation analysis has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of interactions. CA and ethnomethodology are sometimes considered one field and referred to as EMCA.
In critical theory and deconstruction, phallogocentrism is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning. The term is a blend word of the older terms phallocentrism and logocentrism.
Discursive psychology (DP) is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes in talk, text, and images.
Jonathan Potter is a British psychologist and Dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He is one of the pioneers of discursive psychology.
Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, spoken, or sign language, including any significant semiotic event.
Drucilla Cornell, was an American philosopher and feminist theorist, whose work has been influential in political and legal philosophy, ethics, deconstruction, critical theory, and feminism. Cornell was an emerita Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University the State University of New Jersey; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. She also taught for many years on the law faculties of the University of Pennsylvania and of Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University.
Ian Parker is a British psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is Emeritus Professor of Management in the School of Business at the University of Leicester.
Erica Burman is a critical development psychologist based in the United Kingdom. While little known in the developmental psychology research community, her work has been a conceptual resource for critiques of the field, notably feminist perspectives on the connections between different forms of oppression, and methodological debates in psychology.
Ruth Wodak is an Austrian linguist, who is Emeritus Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and Professor in Linguistics at the University of Vienna.
Derek Attridge FBA is a South African-born British literary scholar in the field of English literature. He has made major contributions to several fields: literary theory, the forms and history of poetry, Irish fiction, and South African literature. His best-known book, The Singularity of Literature (2004), won the European Society for the Study of English Book Award in 2006. It has been described as "a brilliant and engaging reflection on how to think literature in terms of the singularity of its event" and as "a deeply important book [that] offers perspectives that can help to radically reconfigure our understanding of language and literature and much else." In 2017 it was reissued in the Routledge Classics series.
Poststructural feminism is a branch of feminism that engages with insights from post-structuralist thought. Poststructural feminism emphasizes "the contingent and discursive nature of all identities", and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities.
Foucauldian discourse analysis is a form of discourse analysis, focusing on power relationships in society as expressed through language and practices, and based on the theories of Michel Foucault.
Feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA) is a method of discourse analysis based on Chris Weedon's theories of feminist post-structuralism, and developed as a method of analysis by Judith Baxter in 2003. FPDA is based on a combination of feminism and post-structuralism. While it is still evolving as a methodology, FPDA has been used by a range of international scholars of gender and language to analyse texts such as: classroom discourse, teenage girls' conversation, and media representations of gender. FPDA is an approach to analysing the discourse of spoken interaction principally.
Elizabeth Stokoe is a British social scientist and conversation analyst. Since January 2023, she has been Professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at The London School of Economics and Political Science. She was previously Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University (2002–2022) in the Discourse and Rhetoric Group, where she remains an Honorary Professor. She has been Professor II at University of South-Eastern Norway since 2016.
Susan "Sue" Speer C.Psychol, FHEA is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.
Judith Baxter was a British sociolinguist and Professor of Applied linguistics at Aston University where she specialised in Gender and Language, and Leadership Language. She served in editorial positions with several academic journals.
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