Alexa Hepburn

Alexa Hepburn was born in Leicester, but attended 12 different schools in the North of England and Scotland. She did an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Dundee, and a PhD at Glasgow Caledonian University. 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. This was combined with a poststructuralist approach to psychological methods, to power, and to the nature of persons, which continued in her first two books: An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology, and Discursive Research in Practice (edited, with Sally Wiggins). She was awarded her PhD in 1995 and she held teaching positions at Napier University, Staffordshire University, Nottingham Trent University, and Loughborough University. In 2015 she took up a position of Research Professor of Communication at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.

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. This has developed into a broader concern with the concept of socialization and how it can be specified more precisely using particular sequences of interaction. She has also become a leading expert in transcription for conversation analysis; her most recent book (with Galina Bolden) provides a comprehensive guide.

Over the years, her applied work has resulted in the development of workshops for helpline practitioners, in particular handling strong emotions. She is currently developing this line of applied interaction work at Rutgers, and extending it into the study of medical communication.