Hedwig te Molder, head of the research group, is full professor of Language and Communication at VU Amsterdam and guest professor Science Communication at Wageningen University. She studies how people communicate issues of science and technology in their everyday lives, using Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis. She has a special focus on the changing role of experts and expertise in an alleged ‘post truth’ society. Domains of application are nutrition practices in lower SEP-groups and elderly people, childhood and COVID-19 vaccination, and health effects of livestock farming in rural areas. In these areas, her applied interest lies with making the shift from debate to dialogue.
Bogdana Huma is an assistant professor in Communication at VU Amsterdam. With a background in psychology and sociology, Bogdana is interested in the fundamental role that language plays in the construction of shared social realities and moralities. Her research draws on various methods for interaction analysis - discursive psychology, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and membership categorisation analysis - to uncover, for example, the moral accountability of social influence and how accusations of 'mansplaining' are accomplished and dealt with.
Elliott Hoey is an assistant professor of Language and Communication. Relying primarily on methods of conversation analysis, his research has tackled some underexamined corners of social interaction, including long silences in conversation and behaviors like sniffing, sighing, and drinking. More recently he has focused on the coordination of construction site activities and the organization of palliative care consultations.
Fleur van der Houwen is an assistant professor of Language and Communication. Her research draws primarily on insights from conversation analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Her research interests include the analysis communicative strategies that speakers draw upon to tell their side and/or to pursue their (institutional) agenda while also negotiating potential interactional and/or institutional constraints.
Gerben Mulder is an assistant professor of Language and Communication. Originally trained in the cognitive psychology of text comprehension, his focus is now on applied statistics and methodology of language and communication research. His current interests are statistics reform in language and communication research, to which he contributed by publishing a number of articles, and optimizing the precision of estimating experimental effects by design and sample size planning.
Joyce Lamerichs is an assistant professor at the Language and Communication Group. With a background in Science and Technology Studies and in Discursive Psychology, Joyce has a longstanding interest in (online) health interactions and the construction of illness stories. Currently, she examines how health professionals manage a range of social practices and how these practices are contingent on particular communication frameworks (i.e., motivational interviewing, shared decision making, patient-centered care). As a co-applicant in the Dutch FAMiCOM project, she examines complex family consultations in neonatal intensive care. In these conversations with parents, physicians talk to parents about withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment for their critically ill newborn.
Lotte van Burgsteden is a PhD researcher at the Language and Communication group. Using conversation analysis, her main interests lie in what actions people perform with language. Her research mainly focuses on how people engage in dialogue on topics varying from the health effects of livestock farming, to the health of newborn, and the role of science in society.
Luuk Lagerwerf is an associate professor of Language and Communication at VU Amsterdam and program director of Communication and Information Studies. Trained as a linguist he further developed himself in Communication Science and empirical methodologies. His research interests concern the design of communication messages and their effects in audiences, especially in news, political and health communication, and advertising. In recent research he investigated the effects of headline formulation characteristics on the number of headline clicks, using A/B test data provided by several Dutch newspapers.
Mirjam Koehorst is a lecturer of Language and Communication at the VU. Her background lies in both Technical Medicine and Educational Science and Technology. Her mixed methods research has thus far focussed on 21st-century digital skills (i.e. critical thinking, communication, problem solving) needed to navigate in an increasingly digital (work)environment. This research was part of the ‘E-skills, key to 21st-century labor’, funded by the NWO. By using both quantitative and qualitative methods she studies the organizational factors that influence the level of these 21st-century digital skills of employees in the creative industries.
Nanon Labrie is assistant professor of Language and Health Communication at the VU Amsterdam and guest researcher at the Department of Pediatrics-Neonatology at OLVG Amsterdam. Her research is focused on the role and effects of language and communication in medical consultations, with a particular interest in the use of argumentation and persuasion in treatment decision-making. In 2019, Nanon obtained an individual fellowship the Dutch Research Council (NWO, Veni) to study the impact of language and interaction in neonatal/pediatric care. Nanon’s research is characterized by its interdisciplinary approach, as well as the use of both qualitative (argumentation analysis, interviews) and quantitative research techniques (surveys, content analysis, experiments). In her research, Nanon closely collaborates with both patient organizations and health professional organizations.
Robert Prettner is a PhD student at the chair group of Language and Communication. His research interests revolve around interdisciplinary approaches to study the (sometimes) turbulent relationship between scientific, societal and political actors. The basis for these studies are micro- and macro-level phenomena of communication that can either lead to synergetic action or fiercely debated controversy. For his dissertation project, Robert studies medical consultations about childhood vaccination, combining a Conversation Analysis of real-life data with an online-survey about parental experiences.