About Katherine

My research investigates how language and interaction create the conditions for cultivating attention, metacognitive awareness, decentring and perspective-taking in mindfulness-based programmes, and how these shape the ways people relate to themselves, to others, and to challenging experiences. I examine these processes across educational and clinical settings, with a particular interest in how interactional evidence can be read alongside learning, psychological and clinical outcomes.

My current research develops this agenda in three connected areas.

1. Higher education and language learning
I study how these capacities are cultivated through educational interaction, including mindfulness-informed approaches in academic English teaching. This includes a mixed-methods and randomised controlled study of a mindfulness intervention for research postgraduate students at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Macau, and qualitative research on mindfulness-integrated pedagogy in undergraduate English language classrooms.

2. Clinical interaction
The MBCT Trials Corpus is a corpus and discourse-analytic study of interaction in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for recurrent depression. I have compiled and prepared transcribed session recordings from two randomised controlled trials for linguistic analysis, and work with the accompanying participant-level outcome measures, so that interactional processes can be examined in relation to established clinical outcomes.

3. Language, culture and contemplative experience

I contribute to the World Meditation Survey, a global collaboration examining how reflective and contemplative experience is articulated across cultural and linguistic contexts, extending my interest in discourse, awareness and human experience beyond a single setting.