Melisa Stevanovic

Melisa Stevanovic is a conversation analyst and Associate Professor in Social Psychology at Tampere University. Her research examines how power, authority, inequality and injustice are produced, negotiated and challenged in the fine-grained details of social interaction. Across her work, she has shown how seemingly small moments in conversation—proposals, accounts, silences, interventions, embodied conduct and displays of expertise—can become sites where broader social hierarchies and moral orders are enacted.

Stevanovic has conducted extensive research on collaborative decision-making, participation, deontic authority, interactional power and problematic experiences of interaction. Her work spans workplace interaction, mental health rehabilitation, autism and neurodiversity, institutional encounters, expert–lay relations, climate activism and the social organization of accountability. A central theme in her research is how ideals of participation, equality and “good communication” may both enable and constrain people’s possibilities to act, speak, intervene and be recognized.

Her current projects include SHADOW – Intervening in trouble at work: Navigating power and social threats in the shadows of interaction ideals, funded by the Research Council of Finland, and TalkGreen – Youth Climate Activism and the Interaction Practices of Democracy, funded by the Kone Foundation. SHADOW investigates workplace intervention as a social phenomenon and asks how cultural ideals, institutional processes and concrete interactional practices shape who is expected to intervene, when and with what consequences. TalkGreen examines the interactional practices of young climate activists and the mechanisms that foster or hinder joint decision-making in complex climate and environmental issues.

Stevanovic has published over 100 scholarly works, including journal articles, book chapters, and edited volumes (e.g., Research Handbook on Social Interaction, Edward Elgar, 2025).

social interaction, conversation analysis, joint decision-making, power, authority, inequalities, autism, mental illness, interpersonal synchrony, accounting for problematic interactional experiences

Publications