Simon Mark HARRISON

Simon Harrison is PI of the RGC-funded project "Culturally Widespread Gestures in Cross-Linguistic Perspective: A Comparative Study of Gestures Associated with Negation in Mandarin Chinese and American English". His research explores embodied and relational understandings of language, communication, and culture across diverse settings and scales with particular expertise in the study of gesture. In addition to specialising in the domain of 'multimodal negation', Harrison also works on topics involving classroom interactivity and English for Academic Purposes, especially studying language and gesture during group interaction tasks and oral presentations. His first monograph The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect (CUP, 2018) worked at the micro-level of spoken language utterances and developed a cognitive-linguistic view of gesture, focusing on the embodied linguistic system of negation His current book project is an ambitious monograph nearing completion entitled The Body Language Myth: Understanding Gesture in Language and Communication. Aiming to dramatically expand the micro-scope of his first phase of gesture research, this book interweaves several lines of empirical and theoretical gesture scholarship from multiple disciplines to propose a relational dynamics of gesture and gesturing bodies.

[2026] Sensing gesture's relationality. Review of Jürgen Streeck, Self-making Man: A Day of Action, Life and Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Harrison, S., Feb 2026, In: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 25, 1, p. 173-181 [2025] Gesture Studies Meets Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (and the problem of gestures without bodies). Harrison, S., 20 Jun 2025, (Presented). [2025] Kinematic analysis of negation’s vocal-entangled gestures: Acoustic and kinesic dynamics at onset consonant of NEVER. Harrison, S. & Hong, Y., 10 Jul 2025, (Presented). [2025] More to gesture than meets the (analyst’s) eye? Querying the problem of online gestural loss from applied linguistics and psychotherapy perspectives. Harrison, S., Mar 2025, In: Language Sciences. 108, 101692. [2025