Meet the CA+SW network members
Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University and Professor II at the University of Southeast Norway. She is currently on an industry Fellowship at Deployed (2021-22). Between 2018-19 she was a consultant at SaaS company Typeform. She works with organizations to understand their communication and develops research-based training to improve their interaction with users. She is the author of Talk: The Science of Conversation, published by Little, Brown (2018), and Crisis Talk: Negotiating with Individuals in Crisis (with Rein Ove Sikveland & Heidi Kevoe Feldman), published by Routledge (2021).
Dr David Wilkins is a Reader in Social Work at the Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre, Cardiff University. David has previously worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the Tilda Goldberg Centre for Social Work and Social Care, as an Academic Tutor for the Frontline Programme, a Senior Lecturer for Anglia Ruskin University and as a Principal Child and Family Social Worker. David’s research focuses on social work skills for practice and supervision, and the relationship between supervision skills, practice skills and outcomes for children and families. In his spare time, he tries to play tennis and the piano (but not at the same time).
Marc Alexander is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Psychology, Keele University. His research uses conversation analysis and discursive psychology to examine interactions in institutional settings. He completed his PhD in 2019 at Loughborough University under the supervision of Elizabeth Stokoe and Rein Sikveland. His thesis examined calls from members of the public to three UK organisations (mediation, environmental health, and antisocial behaviour services), in which neighbour problems were reported and managed. Following his PhD, Marc collaborated with the Shelter housing charity, and examined calls from people in housing/homelessness crisis. Marc developed his findings into a CARM workshop for call-centre staff, which was delivered in 2020. Marc is currently collaborating on projects examining domestic violence calls to the police, and recordings of meetings between social workers and their team managers.
Sabine Jørgensen is a senior lecturer at the research department at the University College of Southern Denmark and a PhD in Social Work and Social Interaction from Aalborg University. In her research she uses conversation analysis to explore interactions in various social work settings. She is particularly interested in studying trust and distrust as conversational phenomena and how shared care for children placed in out of home care is negotiated between parents and professional carers. She develops communication training for social work students and practitioners out of her research using the CARM approach.
Dr Steve Kirkwood is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests relate to identity, justice and citizenship in relation to people who have been responsible for or harmed by crime or injustice. Most of his research involves discursive social psychological methods or evaluation research methods. His research is intended to enhance the understanding of issues of identity and citizenship in relation to justice and injustice, and explore the ethics and effectiveness of responses to crime, with the purpose of improving society's response to those who have caused or been harmed by crime or injustice. His main areas of research are: 1) criminal justice social work; 2) restorative justice; 3) refugee integration; 4) hate crime.
Jon Symonds is a Lecturer in Social Work with Children and Families at the University of Bristol. He is interested in the application of Conversation Analysis to social work as a way to better understand models of ‘good practice’ and the obstacles that social workers face in achieving that. He has research interests in working with parents where there are concerns about children’s welfare, with a particular focus on working with fathers. He has published articles using Conversation Analysis to investigate the recruitment of fathers to parenting programmes and co-authored articles (with Liz Stokoe and Rein Sikveland) on appointment-making calls to GP receptionists.
Karin Osvaldsson Cromdal is Associate Professor in Social Work at Linköping University, Sweden. She uses the perspectives of ethnomethodology and discursive psychology to examine the institutional features of interaction among children and youth in the realms of different organisations. She has published extensively on identity, sense-making and social categorization in detention homes for troubled youth, helpline and emergency rescue services, and social work counselling.
Eve is a qualified social worker and lecturer in social work at the University of Edinburgh. In her PhD she examined how social work practice skills, such as empathy and respect, were achieved in interaction during a group work programme addressing sexual offending. Her research interests stem from her professional experience in criminal justice social work. In particular Eve is interested in how effective working relationships between social workers and clients are built through talk.
Joseph Webb is a conversation analyst and qualitative researcher with a background working in social care with people with learning disabilities, and elderly people. Joseph holds a VC Fellowship at the University of Bristol. Joseph’s research interests focus on the interactional delivery of health and social care, communicational practices around supporting people with cognitive impairments, and using co-production to do research together with disabled people to make in impact in practice. Joseph is currently working on a number of projects, including the function of reported speech in social work supervisions, communication in remote consultations for patients with learning disabilities, and developing remote co-production practices with researchers with dementia.
David Monteiro is a researcher at the Group for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis of Social Clusivity of the Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa (GEACC-ULL) and at the Instituto Politécnico de Portalegre, Portugal. Grounded on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytical framework, his research examines interactions between professionals and clients in social intervention and healthcare settings, with a focus on Social Work, Palliative Care, and Aquatic Therapy. His doctoral project investigated encounters between social workers and clients taking place in Portugal, examining linguistic and embodied practices mobilized by participants for presenting situations needing institutional support, documenting cases, planning future intervention, and socializing clients into bureaucratic and institutional routines.
Eric Laurier is Reader in Geography & Interaction at The University of Edinburgh. He uses video recordings to analyse talk and embodied practice. His research projects involve collaborations with other disciplines such as social work, social psychology and HCI, and with practitioners such as architects, designers and graphic artists.
Dr Clara Iversen is a senior lecturer in social work and associate professor in sociology at Uppsala University. Iversen’s background is in social psychology and her research interests concern how participants in social and health care encounters manage shared understanding. She is currently working with projects on helpline interaction and interaction between people and social robots.
Marie Flinkfeldt is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Social Work (CESAR) at the Department of Sociology at Uppsala University in Sweden. Her research concerns institutional interaction across different organizational settings, including social insurance administration, mental health helplines, and healthcare. She has investigated, for instance, long-term sick leave, poverty, and intimate partner violence, and is particularly interested in issues relating to categorization and ‘equal treatment’ in interaction.
