Research associates

Mary Boyce

Mary is a Corpus linguist and a fluent speaker of te reo Māori, who is currently Director Māori Teaching and Learning at the University of Canterbury. She has been a Research Associate of the Language in the Workplace Project since its inception. In this role she has provided advice on kaupapa Māori research principles and methods, assisted in liaison with Māori communities, advised on Pākehā interactions in Māori communities, and she has checked data in Māori from a number of workplaces. She has also reviewed texts pre-publication for accuracy of Māori language and cultural material. She was previously involved with the Wellington Social Dialect Project with Janet Holmes and Allan Bell and the Wellington Spoken Corpus of NZE where she advised on identifying community networks and arranged community contacts.

Kieran File

Kieran File's research explores professional sport as a workplace, with a particular interest in the discourse genres teams and athletes use when conducting the business of their professional lives. His PhD research explored the post-match interview as a discourse genre, identifying patterns evident in these interviews from both genre and register perspectives. Kieran is currently applying his PhD research to help athletes speak to the media.

Harima Fraser

Harima's role with the Language in the Workplace programme began in 1996 as the liaison person between the team members and participants from Te Puni Kōkiri. She is currently an advisor on cross-cultural issues for the LWP team. Her current position at Te Puni Kōkiri (Ministry of Māori Development) is Kaituruki, Senior Policy Analyst for the Māori Cultural Perspective Unit, in the Office of the Chief Executive.

Mike Hollings

Mike has been an advisor to the Language in the Workplace Project since it began in 1996. At that time he was working for Te Puni Kōkiri but he has worked at several different workplaces since then and as a result his accumulated experience and wisdom has been of great value to the project. He has been generous in providing advice and support, as well as acting as a guarantor of our reliability, an invaluable contribution in making new contacts. He is currently CEO of Te Kura: The Correspondence School.

Jérôme Jacquin

Jérôme completed in 2012 a PhD at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he is now Senior Lecturer of Linguistics. In 2014 and 2015, he was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation to collaborate with the Language in the Workplace Project in Wellington and with the ICAR Lab in Lyon, France [P2LAP1_155110]. Jérôme’s research focuses on multimodality and argumentation in talk-in-interaction, with a particular interest in verbal disagreements and decision-making processes in professional and institutional settings. From 2007 to 2011, Jérôme participated in the European Integrated Project “Language dynamics and management of diversity” [FP6-028702] by analysing the strategic and argumentative dimensions of code-switching in Swiss tertiary education institutions. Since 2011, Jérôme has been the project leader of IMPACT, funded by the University of Lausanne. The goal of IMPACT is to develop an easy-to-use web interface for consulting, transcribing and analysing audiovisual data (more information is available here: www.unil.ch/impact).

Keely Kidner

Keely's research examines the Discourses surrounding controversial mining projects by comparing two case studies: one in Alberta, Canada and one in Southland, New Zealand. She takes a multimodal approach, which views language as one among many modes of communication (e.g. gaze, gesture, layout, etc.). By analysing interviews, as well as produced artefacts (such as pamphlets or protest buttons), she examines the ways in which Discourses move back and forth between industry representatives and anti-mining activists. More specifically, she is interested in how mining companies use wider Discourses to legitimise their expansion, and how activists recontextualise Discourses in resistance.

Mariana Lazzaro Salazar

Mariana completed a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, where she has also worked as a Tutor in Sociolinguistics. Her research interests include social constructionist approaches to sociolinguistics and the discursive exploration of workplace interaction, focusing in particular on intercultural workplace settings. Her doctoral research addressed multiple aspects of nurses’ talk in handover, clinical, roster and staff meetings in both private and public healthcare settings in New Zealand. Her current research explores the formation of in-groups and out-groups, identity construction, the negotiation of expert status, and organizational culture in an array of workplace settings.

Sharon Marsden

Sharon Marsden completed a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, where she has also worked as a Lecturer in Linguistics and as an EPP teacher. Her doctoral research addressed contemporary dialect evolution in New Zealand English and the construction of regional identities. Sharon currently works as a Lecturer in Linguistics at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests include critical and social constructionist approaches to sociolinguistics and applied sociolinguistics.

Maria Stubbe

Maria has been involved with the project from its initial stages. As Research Fellow, she had a major role in developing and implementing our data collection methodology and adapting it for a range of professional and factory settings. Her analyses of the project data have focussed on professional identity, gender, meeting and problem-solving talk, humour, miscommunication and communication in ethnically and linguistically diverse workplaces. Maria is currently Research Director and Co-Director of the ARCH Group at the Department of Primary Health Care & General Practice, Te Tari Hauora Tūmatanui me te Mātauranga Rata Whānau, University of Otago, Wellington.

Jenny Thomas

Jenny is a specialist in pragmatics, and she has written a widely used textbook in this area, Meaning in Interaction. She is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor where she has been involved in developing a parallel Language in the Workplace Project which focuses on the language of community nurses and carers, including bilingual carers who use both Welsh and English in the course of their work.

Jay Woodhams

Jay's research looks into the way 'ordinary' New Zealanders talk about politics and political issues and investigates how this relates to aspects of their socially generated identities. Taking a critical realist approach, Jay's research situates communicative identity work within a rich sociocultural context. Jay has worked as a research assistant for the LWP since 2012 and has been involved in collecting and analysing data on New Zealand building sites. He has also published on metaphor use in New Zealand workplaces, particularly as it relates to the socialisation of new employees.