Elliott Hoey

Loughborough University Scholar Award, Loughborough University - Health Communication

Elliott conducted his PhD research in linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands and comes to Loughborough by way of the University of Basel. His research interests span conversation analysis, gesture studies, and discourse-functional linguistics and he recently published a book about silence in conversation, When Conversation Lapses: The Public Accountability of Silent Copresence. His Fulbright project will examine palliative care consultations, with an eye toward improving conversations about death and dying. By working on video-recorded consultations in a hospice, he aims to uncover the recurrent communicative practices that people use in advancing or discouraging talk about death. This research will proceed in close collaboration with top scholars of social interaction at Loughborough and the support of the Institute for Advanced Studies. The project will produce empirical evidence to inform policy, training, and guidelines regarding how to converse about death and dying. Elliott is excited to develop a network of scholars, advocates, and practitioners in the palliative care field, and he is also looking forward to training his ear for the different regional varieties of British English.