Profile

I live in Birmingham with my girlfriend (who studies how people get sick!🤮). I’m from Yorkshire, and I love walking in the Yorkshire Dales ⛰ and cycling 🚴‍♂️. My favourite things to do are reading 📚🤓, watching Netflix, and spending time with my friends.

I’m a “Conversation Analyst” which is someone that studies how people communicate with each other. I’m interested in how people do stuff with language, like argue, flirt, talk to their doctor, or how they use their phone. I study video-recordings of people doing these things to see exactly what (body) language they use in those interactions.

My research is about two things: first, how people use mobile phones during conversations — the next time someone says that phones are destroying conversations, or social skills then you can tell them they’re wrong! I study how people have no problem using phones in conversations and that humans have found ways of using them whilst being able to talk to each other. Second, I also research how people argue with each other. I’m interested in (1) stopping arguments, and (2) how people can resist something (that is, what can you say to your parents the next time they try and get you to clean your room).

At University, I mostly work on my research. I spend data collection days by finding people talking to each other (and hopefully an argument!).

The next step is to watch to those recordings, I’ll usually listen to them a couple of times and write down if I think I see/hear something interesting. After that I have to spend some time transcribing — we have a special transcription code called ‘Jeffersonian’ (named after Gail Jefferson) so we can show if someone speaks louder, or quicker than normal.

Once that’s done I’ll hold a ‘data session’, I’ll meet with other researchers and we’ll all watch that recording to see if we can notice the same thing or something completely different! Now it’s just the case of writing about it so I can share it with other researchers around the world — usually on twitter, or in more professional places like in books or research articles.

Every day is different — some times I’ll collect data: recordings of people interacting (usually arguing). Other days I’ll be teaching, and some days I get to do analysis which is the writing up of my findings from the data that I’ve collected!