Elizabeth Stokoe: ‘We all talk, but we don’t really know how’
by Ian Tucker from on (#436D7)
The conversation analyst on how to calm someone threatening suicide, how comedy works and Donald Trump's take on reality
Elizabeth Stokoe is a professor of social interaction at Loughborough University. She studies conversation, often working with organisations such as the police or the NHS to improve interaction with users.
What does a conversation analyst do?
We collect recordings of talk in the wild. That's quite important. I'm interested in real talk as it happens, not simulated, experimentally produced talk or people's reports about talk. We study lots and lots of cases of the same type of conversational feature and identify the machinery that generates social interaction.