Professor Potter works in the broad interdisciplinary field of discourse studies, with a particular focus on the way careful analyses of interaction can provide a way of understanding and reworking basic psychological questions. This way of thinking about interaction research is called discursive psychology.
He is currently working on tag questions in media discourse (with an interest in intersubjectivity), a matrix of actions that happen during family mealtimes (requests, directives, threats, admonishments), the role of laughter in modulating actions, and the relationship between descriptions and assessments.
Jonathan often writes more broadly on theory and method in the social sciences and regularly teach workshops on discourse theory and methods.