Sune Vork Steffensen

Sune Vork Steffensen is Professor of Language, Interaction, and Cognition at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the director of the university’s Centre for Human Interactivity, and he is the Editor in Chief of the journal Language Sciences. Focusing on how language and cognition intersect in complex social and dialogical systems, in ways that transform the human ecology, his research draws on ecological, dialogical and distributed approaches to language, interaction and cognition (including ecological psychology, embodied cognition, distributed cognition and dynamical systems thinking). By integrating a cognitive perspective with multimodal interaction analysis, he has pioneered the so-called Cognitive Event Analysis, a qualitative method for studying distributed cognitive processes in cognitive ecosystems. He has applied this theoretical framework through numerous projects in the health domain, both as PI and as Ph.D. supervisor. Projects include investigations of cognitive and interactive processes in emergency medicine, psychotherapy, general medicine, and medical simulation. He has edited five issues and published and 50 articles/chapters on ecological and distributed themes in language, interaction, and health.