University of Hertfordshire

Faculty Member, Psychology

About

My father used to ask me why people talk. His re-iteration of this question prompted me to begin to consider how ideas get off the ground. Academically, I later focused on the beginnings of language, cognition and communication. Rather than identify languaging with ‘use’ of cultural constructs –words or languages –I came to view these as fictions that arise from a history of coordinating. Movement and vocalization suffice to orchestrate beliefs in a cultural-physical world where people engage with each other, artifacts and institutions. As we do so, we talk: we realize values that are, at once, felt, ecological, dialogical and non-local. On this distributed view, language becomes a constitutive part of action and perception. It aids human organisms to individuate as persons whose strategies draw on the constraints of objects/events, languages, culture and the interaction order. Pursuing this, my empirical work probes human modes of life and living. I examine how problem solving and coordination serve to balance emotion, relationships, expertise and decision making. Emphasis falls on, on the one hand, prosody and, on the other, experimental studies. This allows me to connect work on puzzle completion with seeking to understand and improve health interactions. True to a focus on beginnings, I emphasise biological and biosemiotic sources of human modes of life and, inseparably, how the technologies of late modernity are changing what it is to live as part of the world.

Nigel Love and I founded the Distributed Language Group (DLG) in 2005; Since then, I have coordinated our growing community.

Contact Information