Dr Georgina Heydon is the Acting Director of the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University, where she is engaged in collaborative projects that explore gender in relation to the Centre’s focus on conflict, development and governance. In 2005, Dr Georgina Heydon published the first monograph to analyse the language of police interviewing in Australia from a linguistic and discourse analytic perspective. More recently, Georgina has begun to examine questioning procedures across a broader range of contexts, including tribunals, courtrooms and the media. She believes that there is much to be learned from the extensive research underlying modern police interviewing training, and that these insights can help to improve questioning practices in other contexts. She is particularly interested in improving practices for eliciting information from vulnerable members of the community (.eg. refugees) and in providing basic interviewing training for police in post-conflict and post-colonial regions. As a linguist, she hopes to expand best practice cognitive interviewing methods to operate effectively in multi-lingual and multi-ethnic communities.

Research interests

Gender, conflict, development and governance.

Recent publications and reports

• Heydon, G.,Powell, A. (2016). Written-response interview protocols: an innovative approach to confidential reporting and victim interviewing in sexual assault investigations In: Policing and Society: An International Journal of Research and Policy,  1 – 16
• Lai, M.,Heydon, G.,Mulayim, S. (2015). Vicarious trauma among interpreters In: International Journal of Interpreter Education, 7, 3 – 22
• La Rooy, D.,Heydon, G.,Korkman, J.,Myklebust, T. (2015). (In Press) Interviewing child witnesses In: Communication in Investigative and Legal Contexts: Integrated Approaches from Forensic Psychology, Linguistics and Law Enforcement, John Wiley and Sons, United Kingdom

Current projects

Gemma Hamilton, Georgina Heydon, Cerdiwen Spark, Anastasia Powell and Lesley Pruitt (2016) Responding to and Preventing Violence Against Women in CALD Communities: Stakeholder Consultations. Centre for Global Research, Gender Working Group.

Georgina Heydon and Eliseu Mabasso (2015-2016) Towards best practice police interviewing in a post-conflict, post-colonial society: customary law practices and the police investigation of domestic violence in Mozambique. RMIT Foundation, International Research Exchange Fellowship.

Georgina Heydon and Anastasia Powell (2016) Evaluation of SARA: Sexual Assault Reporting Anonymously. With SECASA. Victorian Women’s Trust (pending funding).