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Social psychologists interested in interaction have demonstrated that help‐seeking is a fruitful area for understanding how people relate to one another, but there is insufficient knowledge on how people navigate emotional involvement in help activities. Drawing on discursive psychology and conversation analysis, this article examines third‐party calls to a crisis helpline, with emergency calls as a point of comparison, to see how participants manage emotional involvement related to callers' concerns for others. The analysis unpacks how participants orient to helplessness—callers' uncertainty and inability to move forward—as justifying a focus on the at‐risk person or on the caller's emotions. While dispatchers at emergency centres work to get pertinent information to send help, call‐takers at the crisis helpline are trained to offer emotional support. In the latter case, a caller's displays of helplessness may be treated as a sign of danger for the person at‐risk, but it can also be taken as a disposition to worry, warranting a focus on the caller's emotional state. Showing how participants manage this challenge as they navigate 'whom to help', the paper contributes to research on the accomplishment of subjectivity and objectivity and demonstrates the utility of this framework in suicide prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the post‐Brexit increase in applications for Irish passports through descent, and in so doing, seeks to develop a social/political psychology of diasporic citizenship. It draws on a focus group and 10 individual interviews, all conducted in 2018–19; participants were all based in England and had applied, or were in the process of applying, for Irish passports through descent in the aftermath of Brexit. Analysis, using perspectives from discursive psychology, attended to both rhetoric and narratives of citizenship in participants' talk about the application process and identification with Ireland and Irishness. Participants draw on discourses of both effortfulness and essentialism in working up claims to Irish identity, with effortfulness in acquiring transnational knowledge being particularly central in rhetorically legitimizing less secure claims. The analysis thus builds on previous political psychological work highlighting the centrality of “effortfulness” to contemporary constructions of citizenship, particularly in the United Kingdom (Anderson & Gibson, 2020; Gibson, 2009). It is furthermore suggested that explicitly labeled “noneffortfulness” can act as a rhetorical marker of belonging. The implications of these findings for concepts of diasporic citizenship and debates around jus soli versus jus sanguinis citizenship in both Ireland and Britain are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides a summary of various articles and studies related to LGBTQ+ issues and mental health. The topics covered include LGBTQ+ affirmative practices and challenges faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in Puerto Rico, South Africa, and the Philippines. The document also explores the experiences of transgender youth in school settings, changes in transprejudice among adolescents, and the experiences of same-sex couples in Taiwan. Additionally, it discusses LGBTQ+ rights and legislation in "neutral" countries, the impact of school climate on victimization among LGBQA+ students in China, and the representation of masculinities in South African film. The document concludes with summaries on sexual health needs of rural sexual minority adolescent males in the US, gender role discrepancy and male depression in Israel, and the impact of religiosity and sexual orientation on eating disorder symptomatology in Canada. These summaries provide valuable insights into the challenges and progress in LGBTQ+ rights and mental health support in diverse global contexts. [Extracted from the article]

This document is a collection of papers and presentations from a symposium on the decolonial turn and the future of psychology education. The symposium discusses the problems with Western-centric psychology and the harm it causes to marginalized communities. It calls for the inclusion of locally grounded knowledge and the dismantling of colonial hegemony in psychology. The papers cover topics such as the criminalization of LGBTQ+ identities, the construction of knowledge in textbooks, teaching decolonially in India, and the impact of colonialism on psychology education in the Caribbean. The symposium emphasizes the importance of inclusivity, critical thinking, and pluralism in the future of psychology. Another paper explores the relationship between dietary choices, justice sensitivity, and aggression permissiveness. It suggests that individuals who follow a plant-based diet and have a high sensitivity to justice are less likely to tolerate aggression. The study highlights the need to consider both dietary choices and justice sensitivity in understanding aggression. Additionally, a study examines the decision-making process of forced Ukrainian migrants in choosing temporary asylum. It defines implicit competence as the ability to solve problems under uncertainty and sheds light on the factors influencing migrants' choices. Lastly, a study analyzes how the Philippine government communicates about the COVID-19 pandemic. It finds that the government uses anchoring, objectification, and metaphors to convey the seriousness of the situation and encourage compliance with protocols. The study emphasizes how those in power shape discourses to support their interests. [Extracted from the article]

While political apologies cannot undo what has been done, they are often perceived as highly relevant for healing and reconciliation. However, these apologies are often mired in controversy and highly political. While research on political apologies has focused on the role of intergroup relations, limited research has explored the intragroup dynamics involved. The present article explores how the paradoxical features of a political apology to ingroup members have their source in partisanship. The analysis used methods derived from discursive psychology. Using data from six parliamentary statements that were given in response to the political apology offered to Irish mother and baby home survivors, we demonstrated how these speakers constructed and understood the apology and how these constructions relate to their own political positions. Specifically, the apology to mothers and babies is used for political purpose, allowing majority members of government to position the wrongdoings experienced by mothers and babies in the past and to encourage the national collective to move on. Others seeking progressive social change—a parliamentary minority—use the apology to shape a political narrative that demands national collective action. Our work highlights the important role that identity‐based power relations play in confronting historical injustice, and how this may result in a dual schism with people within a nation becoming divided over both the apology and the appropriate response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposing social movements are groups that have conflicting objectives on a shared social justice issue. To maximize the probability of their movement's success, groups can strategically portray their group in a favourable manner while discrediting their opposition. One such approach involves the construction of victimization discourses. In this research, we combined topic modelling and critical discursive psychology to explore how opposing groups within the feminist movement used victimization as a lens to understand their movements in relation to transgender women. We compiled a dataset of over 40,000 tweets from 14 UK‐based feminist accounts that included transgender women as women (the pro‐inclusion group) and 13 accounts, that excluded transgender women (the anti‐inclusion group). Our results revealed differences in how victimization was employed by the opposing movements: pro‐inclusion groups drew on repertoires that created a sense of shared victimhood between cisgender women and transgender women, while anti‐inclusion groups invoked a competitive victimhood repertoire. Both groups also challenged and delegitimised their oppositions' constructions of feminism and victimhood. These findings add to our understanding of the communication strategies used by opposing movements to achieve their mobilization goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood vaccination consultations are considered an important phase in parents' decision‐making process. To date, only a few empirical studies conducted in the United States have investigated real‐life consultations. To address this gap, we recorded Dutch vaccination conversations between healthcare providers and parents during routine health consultations for their newborns. The data were analysed using Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology. We found that the topic of vaccination was often initiated with 'Have you already thought about vaccination?' (HYATAV), and that this formulation was consequential for parental identity work. Exploring the interactional trajectories engendered by this initiation format we show that: (1) interlocutors treat the question as consisting of two types of queries, (2) conversational trajectories differ according to which of the queries is attended to and that (3) parents work up a 'good parent' identity in response to HYATAV, by demonstrating that they think about their child's vaccination beforehand and make their decisions independently. Our findings shed new light on the interactional unfolding of parental vaccination decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing expression of antagonism toward immigrants has turned immigration into one of the most polarizing issues in many countries, among them Finland, dividing people into those who favor and those who oppose immigration. But while affective polarization of the kind exemplified by widespread responses to immigration has recently received increasing attention from political psychologists, little attention has been paid to how affective polarization develops through the mutual reinforcement of opposing discourses. The application of critical discursive psychology to interviews with lay Finns reveals this mutual reinforcement in progress. In our interviews, Finns across the political spectrum construct five subject positions by attributing blame for immigration‐related challenges. Both sides blame some "other" for the challenges while exempting themselves from blame. Our study makes three contributions to political psychology: exploring how blame attribution helps to generate affective polarization, illustrating the ability of (critical) discursive psychology to illuminate processes of affective polarization in individuals, and bringing the concept of affective polarization drawn from survey research into dialogue with the concept of subject positions constructed by blame attribution drawn from discursive studies of populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research explores refugee integration through the analysis of active constructions of everyday life in Greek cities. It draws from critical social and political psychology literature that explores spatial aspects of intergroup relations and developments in citizenship and migration studies. For the purposes of the study, 25 walking interviews with refugees from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, and Syria were conducted in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki. Interviews were analyzed with tools and concepts of critical discursive social psychology. Analysis indicated three main repertoires related to corresponding space nuclei: "city squares and surrounding areas as minorities' spatial nuclei," "political spaces as urban enclaves of belonging," and "neighborhoods as un/familiar places." Each of these broader compounds represented different people–place dynamics and presupposed different citizenship constructions and claims. These constructions entailed different ways of positioning oneself and others and constituted the ground for redefining integration based on local experiences and multilevel connections with urban networks. Drawing on these findings, the article proposes to reconsider integration through the concept of urban citizenship to explore everyday politics of intergroup relations in contexts of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we demonstrate how international social‐media discussions offer a platform for taking a stance on the war in Ukraine, redrawing national boundaries and legitimising their defence. We do so by analysing data that consist of comments triggered by a viral YouTube video depicting an encounter between an ageing civilian woman, labelled 'Babushka Z', and a Ukrainian soldier. Using a critical discursive psychological framework, we identify five interpretative repertoires: vulnerability, incapacity, national continuity, masculinised warriorship and righteousness. Our analysis illuminates how these repertoires draw on and reproduce intersecting categorisations based on gender, age and ethnic heritage. With the help of these categorisations, the repertoires build competing images of the actions of the figures in the video, which come to symbolise in various ways both patriotism and treason, heroism and cowardice. By aligning with competing historical‐national narratives, the commentors use these images to (de)legitimise the war and its actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do persons negotiate the relevance of historic racial injustice for contemporary concerns? In this paper, I show that persons could develop and use racial categorizations in association with family relations to make salient (or not) the relevance of past racial injustice for contemporary concerns. I examined how people construct and orient to racial group membership as implying historical oppression, and its relevance for contemporary interracial relations in the form of supporting or opposing Critical Race Theory (CRT) teaching in the United States public school system. I examined debates and discussions on CRT televised in the American news media using discursive psychological approaches. Findings show that race categories were developed and used in relation to one's ancestors: parents, aunts and uncles, and distant generations. This was done to raise the salience of past racial injustice, which otherwise would involve offering historic or other social structural arguments. The use of family derived race categories at once personalized and enhanced the credibility of the speaker, and countered possible implications for taking responsibility for past actions. These family‐derived race categories were then a resource speakers could use to negotiate their position on CRT. These findings are discussed in relation to the relevance of time for negotiating racism. Further arguments are developed in relation to how an ethnomethodological approach can illuminate critical arguments on race and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All Lives Matter (ALM) has emerged as a response to, and critique of, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) anti‐racist movement. ALM has been shown to work to undermine and attempt to deracialise BLM; however, there is a need for a comprehensive understanding of how ALM functions in online interactions. The research questions are therefore: What different ways is ALM used in Twitter debates?, How prevalent are these different uses?, and What function do the different uses of ALM perform in the wider debate around BLM? To address these questions, we employed a mixed‐method approach drawing on topic modelling and critical discursive psychology of Twitter posts using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter. A corpus of 294,217 unique tweets sent by 145,994 unique users was subject to Structural Topic Modelling (STM), which resulted in 60 topics, and from this, a sub‐dataset of 180 tweets was generated for discourse analysis. The STM identified 12 distinct uses of ALM, ranging from direct and even extreme opposition to BLM to criticisms of ALM and support of BLM and anti‐racism messages, both of which are explored in the discourse analysis. Together, the analysis suggests that, at least on Twitter, the ALM hashtag is not one‐dimensional nor a settled debate. Moreover, the Twitter public can use the ALM hashtag to denounce racism and the ideological pretext of ALM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines invited reports of racism in broadcast interviews. Guided by discursive psychology (DP) and conversation analysis (CA), the investigation focuses on the interactional moments wherein the interviewee (is invited to) describe a racist incident. Expanding existing DP and CA research on complaints of racism, this analysis shows how reported speech is treated by speakers as an indispensable device in reproducing the incident and providing evidence for the racism reported. This investigation provides further evidence for how speakers treat reporting racism as a sensitive business. This is reflected in the interviewee's accounts as they begin by describing the circumstance of the incident, and the interviewer's collaboration in co‐constructing the interviewee's accounts and co‐managing the trajectory of the interview. Overall, the analysis spotlights how an auspicious environment for victims to talk about their experiences of racism is created and fostered at both institutional and interactional levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feelings of guilt often occur when people are subjected to crime. In this study, guilt is defined as a moral and emotional category, as opposed to the legal guilt. The aim of this study was to investigate how crime victims related to feelings of guilt in the court process. Interviews with plaintiffs in rape cases (10) have been compared to interviews with plaintiffs in assault (10) and fraud cases (10) in order find out if there are differences in the perceptions of guilt for each type of crime. The interviews are analysed by discursive psychology and three interpretative repertoires have been identified: self‐blaming, guilt imposed and guilt resistance. The results show that plaintiffs in rape cases expressed more feelings of being guilt‐imposed compared to plaintiffs in fraud and assault cases. Some plaintiffs in the rape cases describe how they actively opposed what they perceived was guilty‐imposed practices in court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public deliberation is a form of dialogue that allows members of the public to provide input on a policy issue. Public deliberation processes invite participants to engage with each other respectfully, learn about the topic and each other's perspectives, and then work together toward solutions to an issue that are broadly acceptable. In this article, we develop a discursive psychological analysis of public deliberation on the topic of childhood vaccination. In particular, we focus on how descriptions of a parent who did not have her children vaccinated were developed iteratively by a small group of deliberants; how these descriptions came to be accepted as factual; and how these descriptions came to be used to support normative claims about childhood vaccination. Our main argument is that we can develop a deeper understanding of deliberation processes if we understand participants' statements to be rhetorically organised. This is achieved by examining how descriptions of events or people that are relevant to the final conclusions of the group are developed in the course of deliberation; how they come to be accepted as factual and accurate by the group; and how they then become instrumental in supporting a final consensus position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Analysing Digital Interaction" is a book that explores the study of online communication and interaction. The editors highlight the importance of understanding the details of interaction in order to comprehend the changing nature of contemporary society. The book showcases microanalytic methods from conversation analysis, membership category analysis, and discursive psychology to analyze the digital nature of interaction and how it is impacted by being online. The chapters address key methodological issues, such as research ethics and the complexities of online contexts, and demonstrate the performative nature of textual actions and the management of affordances in mediated interaction. The book provides valuable insights into the rapidly evolving forms of life in the digital age. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores constructions of consensus and unity and their potential implications on partisan politics and democratic decision making in parliamentary discourse on the management of the COVID‐19 pandemic in Greece. The analytic corpus consists of transcripts of three debates on COVID‐19 management in the Greek parliament, conducted in the period from April 2020 to October 2021. Analysis using tools and concepts of rhetorical and discursive psychology indicated that consensus was constructed as agreement on hard data, as compliance with health experts, and as national unity, and it was counterposed to partisan politics. Nevertheless, at the same time, appeals to consensus constituted a resource mobilized in the service of partisan politics, as both government and opposition parties appealed to the need of agreement in order to warrant their position and to ward off the position of opponents. The rhetoric of consensus, however, included the seeds of disagreement, since while its necessity was collaboratively accomplished, its parameters and boundaries were challenged. The implications of these findings for democratic governance and political decision making are pinpointed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes descriptions of Ukrainian refugees in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Findings of previous research on news media descriptions of refugees point to problematic descriptions of refugees that downgrade their deservingness of refuge and treat refugee status as an inherent feature of fleeing individuals instead of as contingent on external circumstances. However, there is a widespread perception that Ukrainian refugees are being reported on in a more positive light. We therefore examine how news media describe these refugees. Our corpus includes English media news coverage from February 25, 2022, to March 25, 2022, the initial period of the invasion. A discursive psychological analysis of news interactions where hosts elicit information from correspondents about current ongoings with Ukrainian refugees shows that Ukrainian refugees are constructed as vulnerable, and their actions are treated as reasonable given the situation. These descriptions construct Ukrainian refugees as those who are only contingently refugees and legitimate help‐giving by other parties. Our findings, therefore, highlight distinct, previously unanalyzed ways that refugees are constructed: contingent refugees. We discuss implications of our findings for understanding refugee inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Open Science Movement aims to enhance the soundness, transparency, and accessibility of scientific research, and at the same time increase public trust in science. Currently, Open Science practices are mainly presented as solutions to the 'reproducibility crisis' in hypothetico‐deductive quantitative research. Increasing interest has been shown towards exploring how these practices can be adopted by qualitative researchers. In reviewing this emerging body of work, we conclude that the issue of diversity within qualitative research has not been adequately addressed. Furthermore, we find that many of these endeavours start with existing solutions for which they are trying to find matching problems to be solved. We contrast this approach with a natural incorporation of Open Science practices within interaction analysis and its constituent research traditions: conversation analysis, discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, and membership categorisation analysis. Zooming in on the development of conversation analysis starting in the 1960s, we highlight how practices for opening up and sharing data and analytic thinking have been embedded into its methodology. On the basis of this presentation, we propose a series of lessons learned for adopting Open Science practices in qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how experiences of racism are talked about during broadcast interviews. Inspired by discursive‐psychological and conversation‐analytic investigations on experience in interactions, this study approaches experience as a 'loose term' and as a participant's issue in the unfolding sequence of talks. The analysis documents a range of interactional moments wherein experiences are invoked and negotiated over the course of reporting racism in the interviews. The findings align with the existing discursive‐psychological and conversation‐analytic research on experiences, and provide further evidence on how speakers jointly orient to and manage the issues of who knows and owns an experience, and has the premier authority to claim an experience, in relation to reporting racism. The analysis unveils the intricacy of inquiring and talking about a victim's experience of racism. People's (use of) common sense understanding of the detrimental nature of racism is met and complicated by an orientation to our unlevelled access to an experience of racism, which is a category‐based societal problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the social sciences, there is a wealth of research on the role of language in persuasion in interpersonal communication. Most of these studies have been conducted in laboratories using experimental methods, have taken a social cognitive perspective, and have focused on the effects of particular linguistic practices on how persuasive messages are understood, processed, and ultimately complied with. By contrast, less attention has been paid to how language can be used to create sequential, interactional, and social obligations, in everyday interactions, like sales encounters or business negotiations, where persuasion occurs naturally and is built into the fabric of the conversation. In reviewing the former approach to studying language and persuasion, in this paper, I highlight several critical shortcomings. Then, I argue that, when studying naturally occurring persuasion‐in‐interaction, a discursive psychological approach is better suited for investigating and theorising the interactional structures underpinning persuasion and the role of language therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negative impact of economic inequality on social issues and wellbeing is of importance to social psychology that historically has an interest in social justice. Social Identity Theory is explored as an approach that acknowledges the wider context of social issues. The use of experiments encounters challenges in categorizing wealth and how individuals account for extreme wealth. Mainstream research agendas in psychology are not neutral and draw upon current ideology (such as neoliberalism) that can often maintain inequality. These difficulties are addressed by Critical Social Psychology driven by a social justice agenda that challenges the acceptance of neoliberal values. The application of Critical Social Psychology to wealth inequality is demonstrated with research using UK media data. Critical feminist psychology is discussed to explore the role of class and how to challenge the stigmatization of working‐class people. Finally, this paper outlines how Discursive Psychology addresses how extreme wealth and the practices of the super‐rich are warranted. A discursive approach questions the acceptance of wealth inequality as an everyday assumption and demonstrates how dominant discourse draws upon individualism. Furthermore, Discursive Psychology has examined how accountability for problematic practices, such as tax avoidance that maintain inequality, are managed in media broadcasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1950, the President of the American Psychological Association emphasised the economic and political importance of creativity for US society. His account of creativity exhibits a number of tensions that can be identified in other psychologists' theories and conceptualisations of creativity. This paper considers the tensions from the perspective of critical discursive psychology. In the terms of that approach, the tensions derive from multiple non‐academic discourses around creativity, including popular discourses of creativity and art. The paper argues that conceptualisations of creativity from academic psychology have in turn entered wider discourses, invoked, for example, in recent celebrations of the global sector of the creative and cultural industries (CCI). The tensions within psychology's conceptualisations are significant, however, because they raise questions about the extent to which the psychology of creativity has a common reference and coheres around the study of a single phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent conversations prompted by the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have put issues of workplace sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault into the global spotlight. This paper examines how members of the Australian Liberal Party made sense of, and responded to, accusations by female Liberal MPs of bullying and intimidation in their party. Transcripts of media interviews identified by searching the ParlInfo database (between August and September 2018) were analysed using a critical discursive psychology approach. Two discursive repertoires were routinely mobilised in Liberal politicians' accounts: (1) a gender‐neutral repertoire whereby reported incidents of bullying were argued to apply equally to men and women, and (2) a 'politics is tough' repertoire that served to downplay and legitimise bullying and intimidation as normative and unproblematic. We argues that such repertoires functioned to silence talk about the relevance of gender and the persistence of inequality. The bullying and intimidation experienced by women may continue to be the cost of their political engagement unless systemic change occurs that acknowledges the ongoing relevance of gender in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although critical community psychology (CCP) has embraced several discursive paradigms (e.g., critical discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and Foucauldian discourse analysis), there remains little CCP work that attempts to conceive of CCP through a poststructuralist discursive lens, a lens that extends beyond, but certainly does not ignore, the analysis of data. In this study, we consider what we are calling poststructuralist discursive community psychology through a synthesis of poststructuralist discourse theory and CCP. Such a psychology is one that conceives of social phenomena, and indeed conceives of itself, through a poststructuralist understanding of discourse. We offer two pathways through which to consider poststructuralist discursive community psychology: re‐envisioning community and discursive consciousness‐raising. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical limitations of our discussion, as well as the areas that future work into poststructuralist discursive community psychology may enter into. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The early stages of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic prompted unprecedented displays of gratitude to healthcare workers. In the United Kingdom, gratitude was a hotly debated topic in public discourse, catalysing compelling displays of civic togetherness but also attracting criticism for being an unhelpful distraction that authorized unrealistic expectations of healthcare workers. Expressions of thanks tend to be neglected as drivers of transformation, and yet, they are important indicators of qualities to which people attach significance. Objective: This study aimed to use discursive analysis to explore how the National Health Service (NHS) was constructed in attention‐attracting tweets that expressed and/or discussed gratitude to the NHS. Methods: Having determined that Twitter was the most active site for traffic relating to gratitude and the NHS, we established a corpus of 834 most‐liked tweets, purposively sampled from Twitter searches on a day‐by‐day basis over the period of the first lockdown in the United Kingdom (22 March–28 May 2020). We developed a typology for tweets engaging with gratitude as well as analysing what the NHS was thanked for. Results: Our analysis, informed by a discursive psychology approach, found that the meanings attributed to gratitude were highly mobile and there were distinct patterns of activity. The NHS was predominantly—and sometimes idealistically—thanked for working, effort, saving and caring. Displays of gratitude were seen as incommensurable with failures of responsibility. The clap‐for‐carers campaign was a potent driver of affect, especially in the early parts of the lockdown. Conclusions: The social value of gratitude is implicated in the re‐evaluation of the risks and rewards of healthcare and social care work in the wake of the pandemic. We caution against cynicism about gratitude overshadowing the well‐being effects that expressing and receiving gratitude can engender, particularly given concerns over the detrimental effects of the pandemic on mental health. Public Contribution: This study involves the analysis of data provided by the public and published on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognition and misrecognition have been theorized as key concepts for social justice. Misrecognition involves being disrespected or labelled in ways which do not accord with a person's self‐identify. Racism can be understood as a specific form of misrecognition but little research has explored this form or drawn on notions of misrecognition in the discursive psychological study of racism. Our study addresses this gap by drawing on discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine reports of racial encounters in public spaces, where misrecognition of the targets' nationality is invoked. We demonstrate that instances of misrecognition are judged as racism through the selection and use of categories and/or category‐sensitive predicates that exclude the target of them from (national) category membership to which they claim entitlement. People reporting racialized encounters and those responding to them treat the description and evaluation of such incidents sensitively, orienting to the delicacy of alleging racism. In this article, we enhance theoretical understandings of misrecognition by showing how it is constructed interactionally and demonstrate the value of notions of recognition and misrecognition for the study of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the link between identity and action is a fundamental question for social science. One focus in psychology is how actions like seeking help are implicated in matters of identity. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of identity and help in social interaction. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 400 recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how participants oriented to the link between identity and help. With attention to epistemic, deontic, and affective relations between participants, I analysed how identity was demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential for building and interpreting help‐seeking requests. Participants displayed an understanding that seeking help from Victim Support necessarily implicates identity. Callers' identities as victims or clients rendered their help‐seeking accountable and invoked identities for call‐takers as representatives of a support service. The findings show that identity and help are mutually constitutive. Seeking help constituted callers' identities as victims; and their identities as victims constituted their requests for help. I suggest that analysing identity and help in social interaction provides evidence for the mutually constitutive link between identity and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While attention has been given to understanding support for the far‐right, there is a lack of focus on the way in which a threat of the far‐right can be used for political ends. This paper addresses this using the UK Brexit debate as an illustration. The question therefore is: What is talk about the far‐right used to do in discussions about Brexit? A discursive psychological approach addresses a sample of newspaper reports containing both 'Far‐Right' and 'Brexit', from the first quarter of 2019 (n = 45). The analysis identifies a range of uses of talk about the far‐right: (1) An opponent of Brexit is called a Nazi by pro‐Brexit protesters, who are labelled far‐right; (2) A lack of Brexit is presented as fuel for the far‐right; (3) Remain supporters reject the idea that a lack of Brexit fuels the far‐right; (4) A link with the far‐right is rejected by a prominent Brexit supporter; and (5) Support for Brexit is again linked with the far‐right. The far‐right can be used as a strategic tool by opposing sides of the Brexit debate and – significantly – the supposed threat of the far‐right can be used to placate far‐right ideas, rather than to genuinely challenge them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on studies showing that arguments about the nature of intergroup prejudice allow members of privileged groups to 'perform' a positive social identity, the present study explores how arguments about the nature of prejudice are produced by targets of prejudice in order to consolidate or challenge their own social identity. We conducted interviews with Bulgarian Roma and, based on a discursive psychology approach, analysed the way participants contested being assigned to a Roma‐exclusive identity category, which they treated as produced by prejudiced beliefs of the non‐Roma high‐status majority population. Positive intergroup contact was used to demonstrate the absence of prejudice and counter Roma identity threat. Auto‐stereotyping and disidentification, in turn, revealed how one's own situation is distinguished from the group. We discuss how identity performances founded on prejudice constructions work to maintain or challenge intergroup boundaries. We conclude that studies revealing prejudice constructions of minority groups can explain the sedative effect of positive intergroup contact on ethnic activism and help to reflect on integration strategies that would be compatible with social change in favour of disadvantaged minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manner by which power is reified through newspaper reporting can assist community psychologists in getting a handle on the complex, often contradictory, ways by which ideology and power are constituted in relation to particular communities. Accordingly, the present study draws on discursive psychology to analyse how 377 newspaper articles construct the community of Thembelihle (a low‐income community in South Africa) and how these constructions can inform counter‐hegemonic strategy. Two discourses were identified in the analysis, Signifying Legitimacy and Containing the Protest Community. Where the Signifying Legitimacy discourse established a Statist legitimacy‐illegitimacy binary against which Thembelihle was to be assessed, the Containing the Protest Community discourse constructed Thembelihle as a monolithic entity that enacted a wholly violent, and often directionless, mode of protest violence which was concerned with little more than 'service delivery'. Together, these discourses suggest to us the manner by which low‐income communities are engaged by the State as well as how Statist representations function materially. Certainly, most newspaper articles relied on an interpretive frame whose hermeneutics were characterised primarily by violence and homogenously experienced suffering. Such representation, we argue, signifies the dominant discursive field and ideology against which counter‐hegemonic strategy and (re)presentation must act. Highlights: Fleshes out a means of analyzing dominant discourse.Offers considerations for the development of counter‐hegemony.Demonstrates the use of critical media studies for community psychologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are many definitions and conceptual accounts of 'persuasion' and other forms of social influence, social scientists lack empirical insight into how and when people actually use terms like 'persuade', 'convince', 'change somebody's mind' – what we call the vocabularies of social influence – in actual social interaction. We collected instances of the spontaneous use of these and other social influence terms (such as 'schmoozing' and 'hoodwinking') in face‐to‐face and telephone conversations across multiple domestic and institutional settings. The recorded data were transcribed and analysed using discursive psychology and conversation analysis with a focus on the actions accomplished in and through the use of social influence terms. We found that when speakers use 'persuading' – but not 'convincing' or 'changing somebody's mind' – it is in the service of orienting to the moral accountability of influencing others. The specificity with which social actors deploy these terms demonstrates the continued importance of developing our understandings of the meaning of words – especially psychological ones – via their vernacular use by ordinary people in the first instance, rather than have psychologists reify, operationalize, and build an architecture for social psychology without paying attention to what people actually do with the 'psychological thesaurus'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the argumentative lines employed in an online public deliberation concerned with legislation on same‐sex civil union in Greece. Drawing on rhetorical and discursive developments in political social psychology and sexual citizenship debates, the article focuses on arguments regarding the relevance and the implications of public deliberation on the construction of LGBTQI+ claims and rights. The analytic corpus consisted of 1,000 comments, analyzed with the concepts and tools of Rhetorical and Critical Discursive Social Psychology. A recurring line of arguing against the legislation questioned the democratic quality of public deliberation, representing it as a means used to legitimize predetermined decisions. Moreover, overtly discriminatory arguments were predicated on the values of participatory democracy. Accounts in favor of the legislation, though, challenged public deliberation on the grounds that it allows room for the dispute of universal human rights. The potential contribution of these findings to the understanding of the dilemmas of participatory democracy, the reproduction of heteronormativity, and the assimilation of LGBTQI+ claims is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the potential of discursive psychology (DP) in the study of post‐truth politics. Work produced outside of psychology is considered, particularly from political science and international relations, which have made a promising start. Providing an overview of this body of research, I argue for their respective strengths and weaknesses. The literature so far tends to work with the notion that truth and emotion are matters that are, or at least should be, distinguishable. Instead, I argue that, rather than lament the blurring between truth and untruth, one should look to how these unfold as matters of practical concern in political discourse. DP is a tool particularly suited to the task; it highlights the importance of viewing 'truth' as a rhetorical resource. In this light, we can view post‐truth politics as a rhetorical matter rather than a degeneration of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the study of admonishments, the operation of shaming in family interaction, and more broadly presses the virtue of a discursive psychological reconsideration of the social psychology of emotion. It examines the methodological basis of contemporary research on shame in experimental and qualitative social psychology, illustrated through the Test of Self‐Conscious Affect (TOSCA) and qualitative work using shame narratives. Doubts are raised about how these methods can throw light on shaming practices in natural situations. The study uses a collection of video recordings of family mealtimes, focusing on admonishment sequences in which parents address the interrogatives 'what are you doing' or 'what did I say' to a 'misbehaving' child. Despite the interrogative syntax, rather than soliciting information we show that these interrogative forms pursue behaviour change by publicly highlighting both the problem behaviour and the child's active and intentional production of that behaviour. This is the sense in which the practice can be understood as shaming. Although this practice prosecutes shaming, ways in which the children can ignore, push back, or rework parents' actions are highlighted. This study contributes to a broader consideration of how enduring behavioural change can be approached as a parents' project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to a contemporary understanding of childhood is the developmental and clinical‐medical construct of the 'normal' child. When judged to fall outside of culturally, socially and historically situated parameters of 'normality', children become labelled as 'deviant from the norm'; for instance, in mental health contexts where this may provide the basis for psychiatric diagnosis. However, judgements of a child's 'normality' are further complicated by the range of individuals who may have a stake in that construction, including parents/carers, professionals and the child themselves. Using discursive psychology, we analysed 28 video‐recorded UK child mental health assessments, to examine ways that parents presented concerns about their children's development. They did this by drawing on notions of 'ab/normal', in ways that functioned to legitimise their need for services and built a rhetorical case to demonstrate clinical need; often by contrasting the child with other 'typical' children and/or contrasting the same child's behaviour in different settings or contexts. We concluded that given the growing crisis in child mental health, initial assessments play a crucial clinical role in determining diagnosis and labelling, and therefore, a critical discussion of these concepts and processes is essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses political and media discourses about integrating refugees in the UK in the context of the "refugee crisis". A discursive psychological approach is presented as the best way to understand what talk about the concept is used to accomplish in these debates. A large corpus of political discussions (13 hours of debate featuring 146 politicians) and 960 newspaper articles from the UK were discourse analysed. The analysis identified five dilemmas about integration: Integration is positive and necessary, but challenging; Host communities are presented as welcoming, but there are limits to their capacity; Refugees are responsible for integration, but host communities need to provide support; Good refugees integrate, bad ones don't; Refugees are vulnerable and are skilled. All are used to warrant the inclusion or exclusion of refugees. The responsibility of western nations to support refugees is therefore contingent on the refugees behaving in specific ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When people are in dispute with their neighbours, there are multiple routes to resolution, and different services have a range of remits to support it. This article explores how noise complaints are reported to dispute resolution mediation and local council environmental services in the United Kingdom. A collection of 315 recorded telephone calls were transcribed and analysed using discursive psychology, underpinned by conversation analytic methods. Analysis focused on how the same kinds of noise complaint were formulated for the remit and provision of the service called. In mediation calls, callers directly attributed the source of the noise to the agent of its production (e.g., "it's about the neighbour"). However, reference to "the neighbour" was typically omitted (at least initially) in calls to environmental health services (e.g., "I need to speak to someone about disturbance"). This comparative analysis of different settings reveals the significance of service remit for the design of complaints and the relevance of attributing cause in making a case for aid. Comparing two settings provides a propitious opportunity to demonstrate that noise is not a physically objective phenomenon or neutral category but institutionally formulated social conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has found that stigma can be a barrier to service use but there has been little work examining actual service encounters involving members of stigmatized groups. One such group are those with problematic or unmanageable debts. Providing advice to members of this group is likely to be particularly difficult due to the stigma associated with being in debt. Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this study examines 12 telephone advice conversations between debt advisors and individuals in debt. Both clients and advisors oriented to the negative moral implications of indebtedness and typically worked collaboratively to manage these issues. Clients often claimed a moral disposition as a way to disclaim any unwanted associations with debt, but could find it difficult to reconcile this with an insolvency agreement. Moreover, the institutional requirements of the interaction could disrupt the collaborative management of stigma and advisors could manage the subsequent resistance from clients in either client‐centred or institution‐centred ways. The findings suggest that the products offered by debt advice agencies, as well as the manner in which they are offered to clients, can either help or hinder debtors negotiate the stigma‐related barriers to service engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many Western democratic societies, the far‐right has considerable popular support and is often perceived as the winner of political debates. This raises the important question of how other politicians try to manage the far‐right. We use parliamentary debates to examine how politicians define the identity of Member of Parliament (MP) in response to Geert Wilders, leader of the far‐right Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. The analysis shows that politicians made relevant the shared responsibility of MPs to solve societal problems, by using inclusive language, asking for concrete proposals, and emphasizing engagement in debate. These identity‐related features question the parliamentary role performance of the far‐right. In response, Wilders stressed the MP's responsibility of representing the ordinary people. The politicians used three strategies to challenge this defence: Questioning that the far‐right actually fulfils their self‐ascribed representative role; challenging the notion that only the far‐right would represent the people; moving into a more populist position. Implications for social psychological research on marginal group members are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates how people manage understanding of personal experiences in an institutional setting in which shared understanding of one party's experience can become an issue at stake: social welfare interviews with child victims of abuse. New recommendations on how to respond to child interviewees limit interviewers' support to experiences of which they have direct access. Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology to examine cases in which interviewers respond to children's reports of experiences by claiming to understand, the current article shows that interviewers primarily use such claims after interviewees have indicated that the interviewer may not understand. By claiming to understand, interviewers orient to a difference between an interview requirement – not assuming they know the children's specific experiences – and their ability to interpret the children's situations. The study shows how interviewers use claims of understanding to distinguish themselves as understanding persons from their information‐eliciting approach as social welfare investigators. Findings contribute to social psychological research on how people manage challenges related to eliciting and recognizing experience in interaction. In particular, the study offers research on interviews with child victims of abuse a new angle on the tension between information elicitation and support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to shed light on the discursive effects of a public sexual identity declaration as they surface in the language used to construct the social actor in question. Subscribing to queer linguistically informed critical discourse studies, it builds on and advances the theoretical discussion of coming out in language and sexuality studies. The investigation analyses a corpus of news reports about Ricky Martin, comparing two sub‐corpora, one with texts published before and another with texts from after Martin's public coming out as a gay man in 2010. A keyword analysis is performed to identify linguistic traces of central discourses manifesting in the two corpora. The quantitative analysis is complemented by an in‐depth qualitative analysis of the discursive construction of ethnicity and sexuality in two sample texts. The findings are discussed in the light of discursive shifts between pre‐ and post‐coming‐out phases and clashes between coming‐out stereotypes and the coming‐out experiences of Latino gay men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common for politicians to refer to "our proud history of supporting refugees," yet the historical record regarding responses to refugees is not straightforwardly positive. So how is history drawn upon in political debates regarding refugees? Applying discursive psychology, this article analyzes the use of history in five U.K. parliamentary debates that took place from September 2015 to January 2016 on the European refugee "crisis." The analysis identifies six "functions" of the use of the history: resonance, continuity, reciprocity, posterity, responsibility, and redemption. It shows how references to historical events create narratives regarding the United Kingdom's history of supporting refugees in order to construct the nation in particular ways, mobilize collective identities, and legitimize or criticize political actions. Specifically, references to the United Kingdom's role in providing refuge to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany functions as a hegemonic narrative that reinforces the United Kingdom's "heroic" position and constructs the Syrian conflict as involving an oppressive dictator and innocent refugees in need to help, thereby legitimizing support for Syrian refugees. The analysis demonstrates the flexibility of historical narratives, reformulates the distinction between "psychological" and "rhetorical" uses of historical analogies, and reflects on the social and political implications of such uses of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Batel and Castro's call for reopening the dialogue between the theory of social representations and discursive psychology is to be welcomed and indeed, somewhat long overdue. Despite the case that many scholars are engaging in the kind of rapprochement being advocated for by Batel and Castro, I argue here that the intellectual trajectory discursive psychology has taken during the last thirty years makes it less amenable to the kind of reconciliation called for by Batel and Castro. Two enduring tensions between the two theories that require resolution remain: (1) how we define discursive psychology as it is practised today and (2) the epistemological and ontological status of cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Batel and Castro propose a reconciliation of social representation theory and discursive psychology. This comment highlights the continuing relevance of long‐standing critiques of social representation theory from discursive psychologists as well as their central focus on both how representations are built to appear factual and the role of representations in practices. It suggests that the analytic approaches proposed by Batel and Castro (e.g., focus groups and thematic analysis) are not sufficient to the analytic task. The proposed 'Pragmatic Discourse Analysis' falls short on its central task of identifying pragmatics. The virtues of working with naturalistic data using methods that attend to the action orientation of talk and text are pressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dehumanisation of opponents in conflict has been shown to be a common and damaging feature in the media. What is not understood is how this dehumanisation is challenged, which is the novel contribution that this research will make. Drawing on focus groups (four focus groups each with four to six participants) conducted in the West Bank in 2015 that discussed media coverage of international conflict, this article demonstrates the ways in which young Palestinian participants attempt to rehumanize themselves in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Discursive analysis demonstrates how this was achieved in a number of ways: categorising Palestinians as "human being"; by directly and explicitly challenging the suggestion that Palestinians are less than human; by drawing the enemy into the category "human"; and by embodying the "human." These findings, the first to address the talk of young Palestinians about the reporting of violent conflicts around the world, demonstrate the importance of categorization and how, in this case, the specifics of the use of the (human) category work to rehumanize Palestinians in the face of (claims of) dehumanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the argumentative role of making factual claims and counterclaims in broadcast political debates. Despite the rise of "post‐truth politics," this article argues that orientations to issues of "fact" and "truth" are a live and controversial matter when debating the European Union. Using Discursive Psychology (DP), the analysis is on how politicians use fact‐based (counter)claims in multiparty interactions, in the form of debates about the United Kingdom and the European Union. Three types of factual challenges are presented to illustrate the rhetorical function of claims: challenging the essence of an argument, providing another fact to recontextualize the preceding fact and using hypothetical scenarios to undermine facts. The analysis demonstrates that the use of facts is a highly strategic, argumentative, matter. This study, understood against a backdrop of the rise of post‐truth politics, highlights that concepts of "fact" and "truth" are not done away with; rather they are an argumentative resource and need to be understood in their fragmentary and rhetorical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on EU membership; 52% of those who voted, voted to leave, and 48% voted to remain. During the referendum campaign, two identities emerged: "Brexiter" and "Remainer," which remained salient post‐referendum. This study explores how the categories of Brexiter and Remainer were deployed by posters online. Data comprise comment threads collected from four online newspapers both during the campaign and after the vote, which focus on the Brexit campaign promise: "We send £350m a week to the EU. Let's fund our NHS instead." We draw on membership categorization analysis and discursive psychology to analyse when categories were made salient and what responses to the invocation of categories were. Analysis revealed that posters explicitly categorize the out‐group and in doing so implicitly define their group. Posters resisted other political identities when attributed to them in relation to the referendum. The analysis shows how Brexiter and Remainer are new, albeit contested, political categories and identities in their own right, with other political identities resisted when used. The paper highlights implications for the political system in the United Kingdom and for social divisions within U.K. society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discursive social psychologists have examined various ways in which political talk and participation in politics are accomplished. In this paper, I examine talk related to a populist policy to examine how it is that members of the general public informally participate in populist political practices. I examined transcripts of broadcast on‐air interviews with those experiencing outcomes of a controversial monetary policy in India introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, namely, demonetization. Discursive psychological analyses show that interviewers and interviewees treated talk on policy as implicating political subjectivities for the interviewees. They flexibly offered various forms of assessments on the policy in ways to negotiate implications that they were predisposed to the policy and Modi. Their political subjectivities as those who were "Modi supporters," for example, were attended to and negotiated in ways to accomplish interview participation. The findings show the relevance of personal/subjective assessments and positions in political talk. These are discussed in relation to contemporary understandings of populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]