Dr Marion Nao

Marion’s work focuses on discourse and interactional analysis in applied contexts of healthcare and education, with the aim of enhancing social life and developing theoretical frameworks. She combines close qualitative examination of language-in-use with the systematic analysis of datasets, mainly drawing on approaches from (interactional) sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse studies. She is currently developing work in metaphor analysis and systemic functional linguistics (SFL).

She was awarded her PhD in Language and Communication Research from Cardiff University and has held research posts at King’s College London, The Open University, and The University of Edinburgh. She has taught on a range of higher education programmes at Cardiff University, University of Leicester, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain, and Kanda University of International Studies in Japan. Additionally, she has lived and worked in Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic.

She has published in a variety of journals, including Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Applied Linguistics, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and Episteme: A Journal of Individual and Social Epistemology. For a list of publications, see: https://publicationslist.org/marionnao

She is a member of the ESRC Peer Review College and has previously secured an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship.

Marion is currently working on an Open Societal Challenge, together with Korina Giaxoglou, which explores the impact of publicly shared stories of cancer in (social) media on those with lived experience: Public cancer stories for wellbeing: Keeping it real in an age of influencer culture

With an interest in the experience of cancer and living with prognostic uncertainty and risk of death, Marion is a member of Open Thanatology at the OU. 

She is also collaborating with Chris Tang from King’s College London on outputs from a project examining the experience of stigma in gestational diabetes (GDM). Working to support health and wellbeing in pregnancy, she is a member of the Reproduction, Sexualities and Sexual Health Research Group (RSSH) at the Open University.