Alexa Hepburn

Hepburn was born in Leicester. Because her father was a telecoms engineer she moved between twelve different schools in the North of England and Scotland.^{[citation needed]} She did an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Dundee.^[1] 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.^{[citation needed]}

Hepburn 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.https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/hepburn-alexa

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.

Her critical concerns were brought together in her Introduction to Critical Social Psychology published in 2003. This integrated and evaluated critical work inspired by Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism and discourse analysis.

In the years after this she was heavily involved in editing two collections jointly with Sally Wiggins, one a special issue of the journal Discourse and Society and the other a volume for Cambridge University Press, Discursive Research in Practice.

From 2005 she has undergone extensive training in conversation analysis, attending workshops taught by Emanuel Schegloff, John Heritage and Gene Lerner in UCLA and masters level modules in conversation analysis at the University of York taught by Celia Kitzinger.

Since 2000 she has been working with a large corpus of phone calls to the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children child protection helpline, originally collected as part of her Leverhulme Fellowship. Her work focused on the way the calls are opened, the way emotion is expressed and responded to, and the way shared understandings are developed and contested in the course of sequences of advice. This programme of work has resulted in a series of articles. Much of this work is collaborative with Jonathan Potter.

She has become expert in transcription and has developed Gail Jefferson's basic system for transcribing talk to encompass phenomena associated with crying and upset (sobbing, sniffing, tremulous delivery). This is part of a broader concern with the way emotion becomes something live in interaction.