Director: Professor Celia Kitzinger
I joined the Department at York in 2000 after seven years as a member of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University, followed by a year as Visiting Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California at Los Angeles, where I took all of Emanuel Schegloff’s classes and ‘converted’ from discourse analysis to conversation analysis. I have a long-standing research interest in sexualities and genders and continue to sustain and develop a clearly lesbian and feminist research agenda while also contributing to the analysis of talk-in-interaction. I have recently co-edited (with Gene Lerner) a Special Issue of Discourse Studies on “Referring to Self and to Others” and am currently analyzing 350 calls to a help-line for women in crisis after childbirth. You can download most of my publications here. I am also actively involved in human rights campaigns for equal access to marriage (and civil partnership) for same-sex (and different-sex) couples. With Sue Wilkinson, I recently brought and lost a case in the High Court to have our valid Canadian marriage recognised as such in the UK.
Clare Jackson (formerly Stockill)
I was appointed to a Teaching Fellowship in the Sociology Department at York in 2007 and teach Genders and Sexualities and Conversation Analysis. I was introduced to CA as part of my Master’s Degree with the Open University and was immediately impressed by what I saw to be CA’s potential to provide a richly empirical understanding of the social construction of everyday life. For me, ‘everyday life’ is deeply political; the accomplishment of members’ shared reasoning about what constitutes life-as-usual. The promise of feminist CA is that I can use an empirically rigorous set of tools to explicate where, how and why gender matters in seemingly banal but ultimately powerful ways to construct hetero-patriarchal ‘realities’. I came to CA out of feminist conviction, but as I have progressed through the extensive training in analytic skills provided at York , I have also become interested in making technical discoveries about the basic methods of talk-in-interaction. In the last year, I have become particularly fascinated by practices of person reference, and the actions constituted by them. I recently presented a paper on this topic at the International Pragmatics Association's 2007 Conference in Sweden. My interest in person reference is very much shaping my on-going part-time PhD study of young women’s talk.
Danielle Jones
I first studied CA as an undergraduate student at York , on Paul Drew’s ‘Communication in Medical Care’ module, and then on the module Celia Kitzinger taught on ‘Conversation Analysis’. Within a few weeks of starting the CA course, it became a passion. I found myself listening to people’s conversations in a new way in my everyday life. I’ve known a lot of families that include people with Alzheimer’s and I worked in a residential home that included Alzheimer’s patients for nearly a year. My PhD research, supervised by Celia Kitzinger, and funded by an ESRC 1+3 Quota award, analyses family conversations with Alzheimer’s patients, in the hope that my findings will be useful to families dealing with the effects of the disease.
Dr Merran Toerien
I joined the department in 2007 as the RCUK Fellow in Communication and Language Use in Interaction. My PhD research (supervised by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger), titled “Hair Removal and the Construction of Gender: A Multi-method Approach” consisted of a series of projects, including a study of interaction in the beauty salon using conversation analysis (CA). After my PhD, I worked as a researcher for the MRC Research Services Collaboration at the University of Bristol , focusing on health professional-patient interaction in recruitment to trials and neurology clinic appointments. I am now working with Paul Drew (Sociology), Roy Sainsbury (Social Policy Research Unit) and Annie Irvine (Social Policy Research Unit) on a Department for Work and Pensions-funded project titled: “A Conversation Analysis Study of Language and Communication in Work-focused Interviews”. I’m also continuing work with data I’ve already collected and remain committed to the application of CA to ‘political’ concerns – particularly feminist issues. I’m an active campaigner on environmental issues (particularly climate change) and am interested in exploring how CA might be applied to bring about positive social change in this pressing area.
Rowena Viney
I have come to CA via DA from a background in Language and Linguistics. I have always been fascinated by how people manage communcation with each other and my interest has progressed from a focus on language itself to how it is used by speakers in interaction, in particular in relation to the identities that speakers make relevant in talk. In my PhD research, supervised by Celia Kitzinger, I am using CA to look at the use of references to desire in talk and how they contribute to making sexual identity relevant.