Plenaries
Nordisco 2025 Plenaries
We have invited the three plenary speakers with experience from different analytic approaches within discourse and interaction research. We have asked them to address methodological and/or ethical challenges they (and their team) encounter in their research, and how they address these challenges.
Our aim is to highlight the breadth of analytic work within discourse and interaction studies and offer closer insight into different analytic frameworks.
Pentti Haddington
University of Oulu, Finland
Pentti Haddington is Professor of English Language at the University of Oulu, Finland. He uses video methods and conversation analysis to study talk and multimodal conduct in a range of different real-life and real-time social interactions. Together with his research team, his current interests concern interaction in multinational crisis management training, technology-created asymmetry in real-time digital interactions, and multiactivity. The research is done in two projects: Action and Intersubjectivity in the Digital Age (AIDA) and Talk and Interaction in Multinational Crisis Management Training (PeaceTalk). The team has recently co-edited two books, Complexity of Interaction (Palgrave Macmillan) and Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis in Motion (Routledge). The books’ chapters explore ways in which people interact in complex and multi-layered situations and what methodological questions and challenges are involved in studying those contexts.
Jakob Steensig
Aarhus University, Denmark
Jakob Steensig is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Aarhus University, Denmark. His main focus these days is on the grammar of Danish talk-in-interaction. He has initiated the webpage samtalegrammatik.dk, through which a research group is developing a comprehensive grammar of Danish talk-in-interaction. He was the principal investigator of the research project Grammar in Everyday Life (2019-2023), which sought to make grammatical descriptions on the basis of thorough analyses of actions in everyday interaction, and he is co-editor of the volume Grammar in Action: Building Comprehensive Grammars of Talk-in-interaction published by Benjamins.
Irmelin Kjelaas
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Irmelin Kjelaas is an applied linguist working at the Department of Teacher Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. Her research focuses on the relationship between language and power in multilingual and multicultural professional contexts, with a particular emphasis on schools and child welfare services. Her PhD examines interactions between social workers and unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in child welfare services, and she has participated in several research projects on newly arrived language minority pupils in Norwegian schools.