RESEARCH

Members of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Language and Communication (CASLC) conduct empirical research on language and communication in social interaction in a wide variety of social, workplace and institutional settings. We pursue this research programme using conversation analysis to understand how people accomplish everyday and institutional activities through talk and embodied conduct. Our research concerns the use of language – we focus on how people use language in interaction, so we are not theoretical linguists; we take into account the embodied character of interaction – we all work on the multimodality of interaction; we are interdisciplinary in our understanding of interaction, drawing on linguistics and the social and cognitive sciences, and we are interdisciplinary in our research collaborations by drawing on and working with scholars in a variety of disciplines and collaborating with non-academic practitioners such as doctors and other clinicians, and those in the social welfare sector; we are international in our outlook, often collaborating with scholars internationally, working on different languages and giving workshops in a variety of countries; we engage in both basic and applied research, and we work collaboratively; for instance our research on aspects of health and medical services are generally conducted in collaboration with clinical staff and addresses problems or issues that clinicians want fixing; we've also worked in the past with organisations such as the Department of Work and Pensions in efforts to improve JobCentre+ interviews with benefits claimants, and with the London Metropolitan Police to improve the effectiveness of their emergency call handling.

Alongside research by staff, doctoral projects at CASLC have also produced substantial original contributions to the field. The theses completed here and the publications arising from them demonstrate the depth and breadth of inquiry carried out by our PhD students, covering interactional phenomena across diverse languages, cultures, and settings.