Alexa Hepburn

Alexa Hepburn is professor of communication at Rutgers University, and honorary professor in conversation analysis in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University.

Alexa Hepburn was born in Leicester. Because her father was a telecoms engineer involved in modernising exchanges she moved between 12 different schools in the North of England and Scotland. She did an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Dundee. She did her PhD at Glasgow Caledonian University supervised by Gerda Siann. 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, including teachers and parents. This was combined with a poststructuralist approach to psychological methods, to power, and to the nature of persons.

She was awarded her PhD in 1995 and she held teaching positions at Napier University, Staffordshire University and then Nottingham Trent University. After being a Leverhulme Fellow in 2002 she was appointed to a lectureship and then senior lectureship at Loughborough University. In 2009 she was promoted to Reader in Conversation Analysis, and in 2015 to Professor of Conversation Analysis. In September 2015 she took up a position of Research Professor in the Communication Department at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.

Her early research combined her interests in critical psychology and theory with an empirical examination of school bullying. She explored the relationship between Derrida's deconstruction and the nature of psychology and considered the implications of relativism for feminism. Her work was influenced by, and influenced, the approach known as discursive psychology.

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