I started life as a psychology undergraduate at Liverpool University in the mid 1970s trying to persuade sceptical lecturers of the virtues of humanistic psychology and anti-psychiatry. Three unsuccessful years of that task led me to the work of John Shotter, Ken Gergen, Rom Harré and others, and made think that philosophy rather than holding hands was the answer to psychology's ills. A MSc in Philosophy of Science at the University of Surrey was the direct result of that, although philosophy turned out to be less of an answer as a pathway to the sociology of scientific knowledge. By the close of the decade I was working on a PhD with Mike Mulkay at the University of York on the rhetorical construction of psychologists' conference talk. It was there that I started writing about discourse analysis.

My first employment was teaching statistics to psychology students at the University of St Andrews. During that time in Scotland I was strongly influenced by Margaret Wetherell. We wrote the book Discourse and Social Psychology together there, and it is still one of the things I am most proud of. With over 3,000 citations (and still going strong) it continues to have a major impact in social psychology and across the social sciences. We also co-authored a key work on the way racism can be described and legitimated in talk, Mapping the Language of Racism.

In 1988 I was attracted away from Scotland by the prospect of working with Michael Billig and Derek Edwards in Loughborough, where I have been ever since.

My research has been concerned with the development of discourse analysis and discursive psychology. This work has ranged over a number of substantive topics, including science and scientific conferences, racism, discourses of community, current affairs television, news reporting of political disputes, and relationship counselling.

I have also produced a series of more methodological writings on the practicalities of analysing discourse, the way claims are justified, and the relation between discourse, rhetoric and conversation analysis. I am most interested in developing a discursive psychological approach to audio and video records of natural interaction and starting to explore the way new digital technology can support such analysis.

At a more theoretical level, my work has attempted to reformulate the basic theoretical and analytic notions of social psychology. For example, it provides an alternative to notions such as attitudes, attributions and social representations. This alternative focuses on talk and text in interaction rather than looking to cognitive processes within individuals; it is called discursive psychology. I have been particularly interested in the procedures through which descriptions are constructed as factual as well as developing the implications of such a study for the general approach known as constructionism. My book Representing Reality (sorry about the cover!) tries to pull all that together in a systematic way. It provides one take on what constructionism is and ought to be.

Sally Wiggins from Stirling University and I have worked on food evaluation from a discursive psychological perspective. This work illustrates the respecification of the notion of attitudes.

More Recent Developments

This interest in reconstructing constructionism is joined up, in all sorts of interesting ways, with a concern with the respecification of cognitive phenomena in interactional terms. I have been working on this for some time, often in collaboration with Derek Edwards. We have recently written a commentary on a critical review of discursive psychology by Jeff Coulter.

I edited a book with Hedwig te Molder on the relationship between discourse and cognition, and particularly the role that cognitive states should play in the analysis of interaction. This collection includes papers by Coulter, Drew, Heritage, Hopper, Lynch & Bogen, Maynard & Schaeffer, Pomerantz, Sanders and Wooffitt. The book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. In 2007 it won the inaugural American Sociological Association Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis book prize.

I have also become particularly interested in studying the operation of social research methods in action. This research raises important practical and theoretical issues. Claudia Puchta and I have studied the operation of market research focus groups. In addition to some papers, we have a book with Sage that attempts to capture some of the practices of focus group moderators.

What I am most excited about at the moment is two joint programmes of work in collaboration with Alexa Hepburn (also at Loughborough).

The first is on interaction on the NSPCC child protection helpline. This has a double focus. On the one hand, we are interested in the calls as an arena for exploring and testing ideas about the role of psychology in interaction. On the other, we are hoping to develop resources that can be useful to the NSPCC in their training and quality control. There are now a series of publications on different features of helpline interaction, including the opening of calls, the way emotion is displayed by callers and managed by Child Protection Officers, and the way advice is delivered and resisted, and the way advice resistance is, in turn, resisted.

The second programme of work is focused on a (growing) collection of video records of family mealtimes involving young children. One theme in this work is eating -- how food is described, delivered, resisted and so on, and particularly the nature of parental actions such as requests, directives and threats. This raises broad issues about the nature of socialization and the way culture and interaction come together.

More broadly…

I am advisory editor of the journal Theory and Psychology (an important forum for leading edge thinking in psychology) and enjoy running advanced workshops in discourse analysis and discursive psychology. Over the past few years I have taught such workshops in Australia, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, USA, UK, and Venezuela. I was recently elected to the Academy of Social Sciences, and in February of 2010 I began serving as Head of Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough.