Leigh Harrington

My research interests concern spoken discourse and written discourse in a variety of professional and institutional contexts, including call centres, healthcare settings, and debt collection encounters.  My analysis typically applies theories, concepts, and analytical tools from socio-pragmatics research to identify (in)effective, (in)equitable, (un)ethical, or (il)legal communicative practices. As part the Centre for Language and Law, I am particularly interested in analysing how such communicative practices interact with and are informed by relevant policies, regulations, and legislation. 

My PhD thesis analysed telephone-mediated debt collection encounters in a credit union, focussing on the interactants’ use of face(work) and (im)politeness. Previously, as a Research Affiliate at the University of Nottingham, I have used corpus linguistic methods to identify evidence of public engagement with STEM subjects as part of a REF Impact Case Study.