Jessica Robles

Jessica Robles

Social Sciences and Humanities

Research groups - Language and Social Interaction, Discourse and Rhetoric Group

Jessica's general research is on morality in interaction, which includes two EDI-relevant projects:

Examining how people accomplish and resist stereotypes and discrimination in interaction. This involves closely examining how people convey “-isms” in everyday interactions; so far she has published or is writing up analyses including instances of sexism, racism, ableism, accentism, heterosexism, ageism and classism. She is also in the process of completing a book chapter reviewing discursive and interactional research on discrimination and prejudice.

Another, slightly newer project involves analysing how people argue about political topics, especially in online discourse. This often involves examining how people formulate and show agreement or disagreement about political values and moral beliefs about equality and diversity; some topics she's analysed that people argue about online include treatment of those who criticise the government, attitudes toward protest, and opinions about anti-racism.

A key aspect of Jessica's research across these topics is how people categorise selves and others in ways that socially differentiate and morally evaluate them. 

Publications

  • Robles, J. S. & Castor, T. (2019). Taking the moral high ground: Practices for being uncompromisingly principled. Journal of Pragmatics, 141, 116-129
  • Robles, J. S. & Kurylo, A. K. (2017). “Let’s have the men clean up”: Interpersonally-communicated stereotypes as a resource for resisting gender-role prescribed activities. Discourse Studies, 19, 1-21
  • Robles, J. S. (2015). Extreme case (re)formulation as a practice for making hearably-racist talk repairable [special issue on –isms in interaction]. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 34, 390-409.