My research has mostly focused on medical discourse and register theory, but I am now also using linguistic techniques to explore how we position animals –  both in discourses of daily life and in academic and other specialist discourses, such as linguistics and climate change discourse. Across these areas I am particularly interested in how people construe and negotiate agency and identity, and how they align and disalign with each other, in authentic spoken, written and multimodal interaction. As a longtime champion of studying authentic spoken interaction in all its messiness, I try to bring more attention onto the 'soundtrack' of interaction, including patterns in intonation and voice quality and how these vary by language, dialect, register, emotion, stance and across many other dimensions. I also work on how language is related to social justice - for humans and animals. In earlier work as a public health researcher, I helped create one of Australia's first and most sustainable local food and nutrition policy initiatives (Penrith Food Project), and prior to that my Honours project in Linguistics proposed a typology of phological disorders in L1 Australian Englis-speaking children.