Dr Georgina Heydon
Lecturer in Criminal Justice and Public Policy
Georgina Heydon took her undergraduate degree at Monash University (Linguistics and Visual Arts), completing her B.A. Honours with a thesis examining police interviews with children. This was followed by three years postgraduate study at the University of Melbourne (1998) and Monash University (2000-2002) where Georgina completed her PhD in 2002 on the discourse of police interviews with adult suspects. She taught at the Engelsk Institut, Århus Universitet , Denmark before returning to Monash University in 2003 as a postdoctoral research fellow. In 2005, she joined Monash University 's Language and Learning Services (Arts) for a period of two years where she worked with students from across the Arts Faculty offering support in academic writing and research methodologies. Georgina became a research fellow in Criminal Justice with the School of Humanities, Communications and Social Sciences in 2007, where she is presently employed as a lecturer in the new BA (Criminal Justice) degree.
Georgina is also a consultant for the Monash Forensic Linguistics Consultancy and has provided training for the Australian Federal Police in advanced investigative interviewing.
Media Links
Research Interests / Publications
Research Areas
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the way that citizens are processed by the criminal justice system and how this shapes – and is shaped by – ideologies about crime. My program of research reflects this concern with the impact of ideologies on criminal justice processes by focussing on the legal-societal interface, enacted through processes such as a police interview, but also embodied in the treatment of ex-offenders by the wider community.
- Ideological motivations for police use of discretionary powers
- Benchmarking international standards for police investigative interviewing
- Discourses of the criminal justice system – how these are shaped by institutionality and socio-cultural beliefs or understandings
- Civil rights, voluntariness and ‘reasonable force’
- Media representations of crime
- Developing public policy in relation to the use of police records checking by employers
- The use of ‘lie detection’ text analysis by police investigators
Selected publications:
- 2008. The art of deception: myths about lie detection in written confessions. In L. Smets and Aldert Vrij (Eds) Cahiers Policestudies: Special Investigative Interviewing techniques; The use of written - and oral analyses.Brussels, Politeia
- 2008. The risk to testimonial integrity of moral judgements in police interviews. Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture. 40 (3)
- 2008. The importance of being (in)formal. (2008) In K. Kredens and S. Goźdź-Roszkowski (Eds) Language and the Law: International Outlooks. Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang GmbH
- 2008. Research in Discourse Analysis. In G. Finch and K. Allen (Eds) The Linguists Companion. Houndsmills: Palgraves Macmillan Ltd.
- 2008. Research in Forensic Linguistics. In G. Finch and K. Allen (Eds) The Linguists Companion. Houndsmills: Palgraves Macmillan Ltd.
- 2008 Forensic Linguistics. In G. Finch and K. Allen (Eds) The Linguists Companion. Houndsmills: Palgraves Macmillan Ltd.
- 2008 Corpus Linguistics: In G. Finch and K. Allen (Eds) The Linguists Companion. Houndsmills: Palgraves Macmillan Ltd.
- 2007 When silence means acceptance: understanding the right to silence as a linguistic phenomenon. Alternative Law Journal. Vol 32 (3) pp 147-51
- 2006 The guilty silence: the discursive implications of non-response in a police interview Monash University Linguistics Papers. Vol 5 (1)
- 2005 The Language of Police Interviewing: a critical analysis . Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan Inc.
- 2004 'Establishing the structure of police evidentiary interviews with suspects.' : The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law: Forensic Linguistics. Vol 11 (1)
- 2003 'Do you agree that she would have been frightened?' An investigation of discursive practices in police-suspect interviews. Thesis Abstract. Forensic Linguistics. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Vol 10 (1)
- 2003 'Now I didn't mean to break his teeth': Applying CA to problems of power asymmetry and voluntary confessions., Proceedings of 35th Annual Meeting of the British Association of Applied Linguistics . U.K.
- 2002 'Do you agree that she would have been frightened?' An investigation of discursive practices in police-suspect interviews. PhD Thesis, Linguistics Program, Monash University.
- 2000 The myth of the linguistic lie detector. Monash University Linguistics Papers . Vol 2 (2).
- 1998 Participation frameworks, discourse features and embedded requests in police V.A.T.E. interviews with children. Monash University Linguistics Papers . Vol 1 (2). pp21-32.
- 1997 Participation frameworks, discourse features and embedded requests in police V.A.T.E. interviews with children. Honours Thesis, Linguistics Department, Monash University .
Contact Details
| Tel: | +61 3 990 34308 |
| Fax: | +61 3 990 34225 |
| Office: | B4.19A |
| Georgina.Heydon@arts.monash.edu.au | |
| Address: |
School of Humanities, Communications and Social Sciences |