Joyce Lamerichs is assistant professor at the department of Language, Literature and Communication, and is based at the VU, in the Faculty of Humanities. She has a broad interest in studying how experts and lay people interact in institutional settings in which topics to do with (mental) health and illness are discussed (e.g., doctor-patient interaction, counselling). Within this broad field she is particularly interested in ways in which children and young adults participate in such settings and how they are able to display their interactional competence. For example in response to particular questions that are being asked by professionals. Interactionally, questions carry action agendas and moral implications and the ways in which these implications may be managed when children provide answers lies at the core of her studies of these types of conversational data. One of the projects she is engaged in is concerned with psychological research interviews in which children are asked questions about their recovery from a traumatic experience by a trained psychologist (click here for a full overview of publications).
Since 2016 she is also involved in FAMICOM, a collaborative project together with the AMC in which an interactional approach is used to study end-of-life conversations in different intensive care units in participating university medical centres in the Netherlands. The project is part of the ZON-Mw programme on Palliative Care.
Besides exploring these issues in face-to-face conversations, Joyce Lamerichs also looks at mediated forms of communication in which health concerns are discussed, for example in chat and e-mail counselling on depression, anxiety disorders or addiction. More in general, she is interested in how matters of health and illness are talked into being by patients in their stories about illness. In order to facilitate those research interests she collaborates in the Dutch www.pratenovergezondheid.nl, together with colleagues at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at UMCG. As part of that collaboration, she has also examined how patient narratives can be employed in health education, in particular in the field of dementia care in Dutch secondary Vocational Education and Training (VET).
ICE lab 