Alexandra Georgakopoulou

Alexandra is a discourse analyst with a focus on the role of communication in how ordinary people present themselves and relate to others in significant socialization contexts (e.g. family, friendship groups, school, leisure sites, social media platforms). She has specifically examined the role of everyday life stories in the (re)formation of social relations and in (post)feminist and youth identity politics. This work has led to the development of small stories research, a paradigm for studying identities through narrative. She has published 12 books which include:

• Small stories, interaction and identity,  2007, John Benjamins.
• Analyzing narrative  with Anna De Fina, 2012, CUP.
• The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, co-edited with Anna De Fina, 2015, Wiley-Blackwell.
• The Routledge Handbook of Language & Digital Communication, co-edited with Tereza Spilioti, 2016.

Her latest publications include:

• Quantified storytelling: A narrative analysis of metrics on social media (2020, with Stefan Iversen & Carsten Stage, Palgrave).
• The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies (2020; co-edited with Anna De Fina, Cambridge University Press).

Alexandra is (co)-Lead of the Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication and Chair of the School's PaRC (Postgraduate Research Committee). 

Alexandra is (Co)-Editor of the Routledge Book Series Research in Narrative, interaction and discourse.

Research interests

Alexandra's research interests include:

• Discourse and narrative analysis, small stories research
• Discourse, social interaction, culture and identities
• Youth and gender in communication
• Social media communication: Sharing small stories online
• Critical discourse analysis of the media ‘curation’ of stories
• Self-presentation, popular subjects and Influencers on social media
• The social mediatization of the Eurozone and the Greek financial crisis
• Modern Greek language, discourse and culture

Teaching

Alexandra teaches on the following modules:

• Analysing stories and identities
• Language, discourse and social media 
• Language, identity and culture 
• Language politics: (Post)-national and global contexts 

PhD supervision

Alexandra is happy to supervise topics on the broad spectrum of:

• Discourse, narrative and identities analysis
• Language, society and culture
• Social media communication

She has experience in a broad range of methodologies, e.g. narrative analysis, social interactional/conversation analysis, research interviews, computer-mediated discourse analysis, (digital) ethnography, corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Specific current interests include working with small stories research on social media, especially Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.

Alexandra has supervised circa 50 PhD students and numerous visiting PhD students, working on a wide range of languages (e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Spanish etc.), cultures and materials within discourse, narrative analysis, sociolinguistics, and social media communication.

Her current PhD students and their topics are:

• Maxine Ali - A feminist critical discourse analysis of wellness on Instagram.
• Yanlu Cheng - The role of emotion discourse in the self-referential construction of national identity on Chinese microblogging platform.
• Annelies Foccaert - Women’s experiences with the autism diagnosis: constructing identities through small stories and positioning practices in narrative research interviews.
• Laura Sae Miyake Mark - Being 'hafu' on/offline: A multi-sited ethnographic study of mixed-Japanese identities.
• Christos Sagredos - A small stories approach to sex workers' identity constructions in digital environments.
• Vasiliki Saloustrou - Im/politeness understandings in Greek friendship groups: conceptualising im/politeness in ongoing interaction and in narrative.
• Wei Wei - Beauty and the construction of young female identities on China's social media: Multimodal small stories and positionings of beauty and fashion bloggers on Xiaohongshu.

Further details

For further details please see Alexandra's Research Staff Profile.