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This paper discusses a qualitative study that explores the impact the development of a cultural contact zone has upon identity processes in the Dialogical Self. The analysis draws upon interviews with Irish nationals, immigrants and asylum seekers in a new cultural contact zone. The findings illustrate uncertainty experienced as a result of immigration, suggesting that the development of the contact zone caused cultural discontinuity. The individuals' uncertainty for their cultural identities' future viability demanded the development of identity strategies to maintain continuity with their perceived cultural future, where they were faced with cultural others. Identity repositionings and a strategy to maintain continuity will be explored in the current paper. The Irish and asylum seeker participants' unprompted focus on schooling will be explored as a continuity strategy. The participants constructed schooling as a tool for the ‘cultural correction’ of migrant children and a means for the assimilation of migrants into the Irish community. The paper discusses the function of this strategy for the two groups, and the theoretical integration of cultural level processes in the theory of the Dialogical Self. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at a political speech given by the leader of the opposition party during the run up to the UK elections in 2005. Using this speech as a starting point, we attempt to trace the path of ‘racism’ within a text that makes explicit claims to being ‘not racist’. Drawing on a number of theoretical and methodological resources, this paper approaches the analysis by focusing on a number of conceptually heterogeneous elements that, in relation with each other, function to produce, re-produce and stabilize ‘racism’. One of the difficulties commonly encountered in social psychological work, we would suggest, is that an explicit statement of allegiance to a particular methodological and theoretical tradition can also result in a restriction of theorization to a particular ‘level of analysis’. That is to say, a methodological process that constructs a pre-given category, presets the criteria by which ‘racism’ can be identified and fixes the ‘level of analysis’ at which it can be studied risks ignoring the multiple points of contact at which ‘racism’ can be made visible or made to disappear. The concern here it that such a process can work to reinscribe the very ‘racisms’ we aim to disrupt. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]