Louise Phillips, Ph.D.

Professor of Communication
Department of Communication
Business and Information Technologies
Roskilde University
Postbox 260, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark

Email: louisep@ruc.dk
Phone: +45 4674 3799
Web: http://forskning.ruc.dk/site/person/louisep

Born in Glasgow, Louise moved to Denmark after finishing a Ph.D. in the Department of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science in 1993, and has been employed at Roskilde University since 1994. Until around 2005, she carried out research projects on mediatised political communication, environmental communication and the individualisation of public problems and the development of discourse analysis as research methodology.

Her research since 2005 has concentrated on dialogic and participatory approaches to communication theory and practice, including approaches to collaborative research. In her monograph on the topic (The Promise of Dialogue: The Dialogic Turn in The Production and Communication of Knowledge, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011) she explores the spread of dialogue-based, collaborative approaches to producing and communicating knowledge across diverse fields of social practice. Here, she follows a critical, reflexive approach that, at one and the same time, interrogates the complexities, tensions and dilemmas inherent in doing “dialogue”, “collaboration” and “participation” and is oriented towards further developing dialogic practices from a normatively supportive position. She presents a theoretical framework for understanding and analysing the dialogic turn that builds bridges across the research traditions of dialogic communication theory, action research, and science and technology studies. The framework has been developed in interplay with empirical material in three case studies, presented in the book, in the fields of planned communication and campaigns, public engagement with science, and collaborative research.

She was the co-ordinator of the NordForsk Network for the Study of the Dialogic Communication of Research (2008-2011) and is one of the co-founders, and current Chair, of the Science and Environment Communication Section of ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association).

She is committed to collaboration across theory and practice with a view to mutual learning.

Selected publications:

  • Phillips, L., Kristiansen, M., Vehvilainen, M. and Gunnarsson, E. (ed.) (in press). Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research: A Reflexive Approach. Routledge Advances in Research Methods Series. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Phillips, L., Carvalho, A. and Doyle, J. (ed.) (in press). Citizen Voices: Performing Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication, ECREA Book Series. London: Intellect Publications.
  • Phillips, L. (2011). The promise of dialogue: The dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
  • Phillips, L. (2011). “Analysing the dialogic turn in the communication of research-based knowledge: an exploration of the tensions in collaborative research”, Public Understanding of Science 21(1): 80-100.
  • Jørgensen, M.W. and Phillips, L. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: Sage (Russian Translation: D?????? ?????? ?????? ? ??m??. Kharkov, Ukraine: Humanitarian Center, 2004, 2008).