Inaugural Lecture
17 February 2009
The Incitement to Communicate: Professional Vision and Discourse
Practice in Child Counselling
Professor Ian Hutchby
Professor of Sociology
Personal Biography
Professor Ian Hutchby took up the Chair in Sociology at the University of Leicester in 2007.
In terms of his personal biography, this was almost to come full circle, since he was born
nearby, in Derby, in 1960. Indeed, although his family moved south when he was eleven, his
parents returned to the area and have now lived in Leicester for the last 27 years.
Before coming to Leicester Professor Hutchby was Professor of Sociology and
Communications at Brunel University. He worked at Brunel for twelve years, arriving as a
lecturer in 1995 and being awarded a Personal Chair in 2005. Before that he held a Research
Fellowship at the University of Surrey, working in the Social and Computer Sciences
Research Group on the problems of how to model human conversational capabilities in
computers. He gained a doctorate in Sociology from the University of York in 1993,
specialising in the analysis of arguments in human conversation.
Professor Hutchby’s research is about how humans use language in social interaction. He is
interested in analysing how everyday speech relates to the structures of human relations,
social institutions, and other mediating environmental factors such as technology. He has
conducted studies on a range of topics including language in broadcasting, the role of new
technologies in mediating interaction, children’s language and interaction skills,
psychotherapy and other counselling discourses. As well as a large number of papers in
journals and edited volumes, he has published nine books, the most recent of which, a fourvolume collection of the most significant 20th century contributions to the study of language
and social interaction, was published in 2008.
Professor Hutchby is currently the Director of Research in the Department of Sociology at
Leicester.
Synopsis of the Lecture
In this lecture I will discuss my research into the talk of child counsellors in interaction with
young children aged between 4-12 years.
The study is based on recordings of counselling sessions offered to children whose parents
are in the process of separation or divorce. The children’s parents themselves were not
present during these sessions.
A central focus is on the practice of what is known, in counselling psychology, as ‘active
listening’. This refers to the ways in which counsellors seek to show responsivity to what the
child is saying. In my recent book The Discourse of Child Counselling (John Benjamins
Publishers, 2007), I have shown that this practice is more complex than texts on counselling
have generally acknowledged. The lecture will discuss some of the ways in which the
practices of active listening are bound up in the construction of the child as an object of
therapy – that is, as someone for whom certain counselling-relevant problems or issues apply.
Using a small amount of representative data, I argue that one of the main activities of child
counsellors is that of seeking to reveal the child’s difficulties with current family life in a
context where, often, children do not volunteer that information. Active listening is therefore
involved not just in responding empathically to what the child says, but in construing what
the child does and does not say in a way that can be relevant to the practices and agendas of
counselling.
The research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, the UK’s leading
funder of social science research.