Alexa Hepburn

Alexa Hepburn is Reader in Conversation Analysis in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University.

Life

She was born in Leicester due to her father's occupation (as a telecom engineer) she moved between 12 different schools in England and Scotland. She did an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Dundee did a PhD in the psychology department at that university. This focused on school bullying, with a particular interest in the way pupils were bullied by teachers. This was combined with a poststructuralist approach to psychological methods, to power, and to the nature of persons.

After being awarded her PhD in 1995 she had 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 at Loughborough University. In 2009 she was promoted to Reader in Conversation Analysis.

Work

Her early work combined her interests in critical psychology and theory with an empirical examination of school bullying. She explored the relationship of Derrida's deconstruction and the nature of psychology and considered the implications of relativism for feminism.

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.

From 2005 she has undergone extensive training in conversation analysis, attending workshops taught by Shegloff, Heritage and Lerner in UCLA and a masters course in conversation analysis at the University of York.

She used this conversation analytic when working with a large corpus of phone calls to the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children child protection helpline. Her work focused on the way the calls are opened, the way emotion is expressed and receipted, 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

Recent Developments

Her recent work has been focused on interaction in family mealtimes involving young children. This has involved working with video recordings of meals and studying basic actions such as requests, directives, admonishments and threats. Like the rest of her work this is designed to have an applied focus yet also provide a critique of mainstream individualist positions in psychology.