Grounding Citizenship: Toward a Political Psychology of Public Space

This article considers the political nature of public space and explores its psychological relevance as a natural arena of citizenship. Drawing on literature in social psychology, environmental psychology, and political geography, the article addresses how common understandings of normative behavior in public are often based on particular constructions of place and people‐space relations. In so doing, it shows how such culturally shared “locational” notions are essentially contested in relation to their political significance and ideological orientation within a particular public socio‐spatial context. It is argued that claims for and demands on public space are enshrined in broader struggles over the psychological boundaries of belonging, identity, and civic entitlements which are central to the contentious issue of citizenship. This is illustrated through the analysis of an emblematic struggle over a public space located in the Old Town of Barcelona between 1999 and 2007, triggered by the social appropriation of an undeveloped urban lot. The article pinpoints how considering the material dimension of public space may also enrich existing psychological approaches to citizenship.     

Social citizenship and social psychology

This paper outlines the concept of social citizenship, which was first theorized in the late 1940s alongside the creation of the UK welfare state and concerns citizens' rights to a basic income and standard of living. It suggests that social citizenship—particularly welfare provision—is a useful and important topic for social psychological research, albeit one that has been largely overlooked. We provide an overview of key developments in social citizenship and consider the impact of 30‐plus years of neoliberal governance in Western democracies, which has resulted in ongoing changes to how welfare rights and responsibilities are configured, such as policies that make social citizenship rights contingent on conduct. We outline social scientific work that examines these shifting ideas of citizenship, personhood, welfare, and conditionality and make the case for a critical discursive psychological approach, which we illustrate with a brief empirical example. We suggest that critical discursive social psychology is particularly well‐placed to examine how psychological assumptions are built into both policy and lay discourse and how these can legitimate interventions designed to work on the conduct of the unemployed, such as therapeutic and behavior change initiatives. Finally, we argue that psychology is faced with a choice; while there are opportunities for the discipline to contribute to the design and implementation of such initiatives, to do so requires accepting the basic values of the underpinning neoliberal agenda. Instead, it is vital to place these assumptions under the critical microscope and explore how they work to obscure structural disadvantage.     

Social Psychology and Media: Critical Considerations

In this paper, we argue that media saturate everyday living, and that people engage with and are engaged by media in diverse and complex ways. We suggest a need for an informed social psychology of media that conceptualises media as social practice, and attends to media practices as they occur. We propose that much media psychology research is limited because it: (i) focuses too strongly on documenting causal, and usually negative, media effects; (ii) continues to apply unsuitable research methodologies and theories to investigating media and ignores advances in media research and theory arising outside the discipline; and (iii) largely ignores the social contexts in which media engagements occur. These arguments are illustrated by studies that take a more social and critical approach to media research and that show possibilities for overcoming these limitations and developing insights into psychological concerns enmeshed in media practices.     

Histoire et tendances de la psychologie critique en Amérique du Nord

Critical psychology in the United States and Canada identifies psychology as inherently a political enterprise. It has developed along three overlapping but distinct lines that diverge in history, focus, and purpose: (a) building on psychology's empirical research methods, employing them to help reduce injustice and advance progressive or radical social change; (b) rejecting mainstream psychology's positivist and individualistic theoretical and empirical underpinnings and developing emancipatory theory and practices in their place; and (c) challenging psychology's institutional power over individuals, especially mentally and emotionally troubled individuals whose behavior strikes others as problematic. This article first describes each approach's history, influences, and roles in academic scholarship and institutions and in professional and nonacademic organizations. It then details recent efforts to expand and institutionalize a critical psychology presence despite mainstream North American psychology's strong resistance, while noting the central intertwining of personal networks, political leanings, and psychological theory. Finally, it briefly considers the implications and consequences of the lack of consensus about what critical psychology is and should become.     

Re-reading Discourse and Social Psychology: transforming social psychology

This paper considers one theme in the contemporary legacy of Potter and Wetherell's (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology. It overviews the context that led to that book and considers a series of critical responses from both experimental and critical/qualitative social psychologists. It refutes criticisms and corrects confusions. Focusing on contemporary discursive psychology, it highlights (a) its rigorous use of records of actual behaviour; (b) its systematic focus on normative practices. In methodological terms, it (a) highlights limitations in the use of open-ended interviews; (b) considers the way naturalistic materials provide access to participants' own orientations and displays; (c) builds a distinctive logic of sampling and generalization. In theoretical terms, it (a) highlights the way discourse work can identify foundational psychological matters; (b) offers a novel approach to emotion and embodiment; (c) starts to build a matrix of dimensions which are central to the constructing and recognizing of different kinds of social actions. It now offers a fully formed alternative social psychology which coordinates theory and method and a growing body of empirical work.     

Pray for the fatherland! Discursive and digital strategies at play in nationalist political blogging

Political blogs have come to constitute important channels for expressing nationalist and anti-immigration political views. The new forms that this rhetoric may take, comprising an intricate intermingling of verbal, digital, (audio-)visual, and communicative elements, present challenges for qualitative research. In this article we propose a way for analysing this “new” nationalist political discourse from a qualitative social psychological perspective. The suggested approach combines analytical procedures form critical discursive and rhetorical psychology with social semiotic and rhetorical studies of images, completed with analytical tools and concepts from narrative psychology and research into online political communication. Using two empirical examples of nationalist and anti-immigration political blog-entries written during the 2015 “refugee crisis,” we show this approach enables the researcher to adequately study how such political messages are conveyed through the multitude of elements provided by the blogs. In so doing, our ultimate goal is to contribute to the analytical capacity of qualitative social psychological research into contemporary political communication and persuasion.     

The Silence of Psychologists

Unlike certain Israeli historians or sociologists who have developed a critical "post-Zionist" approach, Israeli psychologists display few signs of this critical trend. This is especially disquieting in light of the latest back and forth movement between warfare to the peace process—a movement that created many new social and individual dilemmas that would benefit from an open debate within social and clinical psychology. This paper tries to account for this deficiency by looking at its possible historical, political, and cultural roots. The historical aspects relate to the influence of European and American psychological traditions. Two political aspects are presented: (1) Israeli psychologists, through their involvement in the military and their acceptance of the Zionist claim for security, tend to belong to the political mainstream (Gergen, 1973, 1989); and (2) a hyper-political atmosphere scared Israeli psychologists into neutrality and objectivism. This provided a convenient rationale for apoliticism, especially when Israeli political polarization in the 1980s and 1990s was perceived as threatening psychologists' professional authority. Culturally, the psychologists, like the European social strata from which most of them originated, tended to adopt the American tradition of individualism as a reaction to the strong collectivist trend that dominated Israeli society during its early years. This may account for their weak and delayed social response of humanism, feminism, and constructivism. Exceptions to this general trend are highlighted, and the question of how Israeli psychology might become more politically sensitive and critical is explored. This discussion may have relevance for the development of political psychology in other societies, especially those going through transition of values or suffering from long, violent conflicts.     

Psychology in Pursuit of Justice: The Lives and Works of Emmanuel Levinas and Ignacio Martín-Baró

Psychological research and theory are inherently political and social practices. As such, these authors assert that social justice must be a primary concern of the psychological sciences. In case study format, the authors use the exceptional lives and works of continental philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró to exemplify the recognition that justice must be centrally infused into psychological thought and practice. The life and work of philosopher Levinas is characterized by a concern for how Western philosophy has funded constructs of selfhood and identity that have created moral anemia and hampered our responsibility to others. Martín-Baró, a prominent Latin American researcher and educator, found research to be a powerful tool to expose oppressive social systems and widespread deception in an effort to end unjust practices, thereby affecting social change. Biographical material and details concerning their systems of research and thought will be used to illustrate what it means to engage in morally-just research and theorizing within the field of psychology.     

THE TECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Changes in technology tiller the ability of people to express competence, to interact with others, to he active rather than passive, and to exercise influence. For the most part, these changes in psychological processes are accidental by-products of technology's attempts to solve the practical problems of society. Because of the close relation between technology and social behavior, we argue that technology should be included as an explanatory variable in social psychology's construction of behavior. Several benefits should result from developing a social psychology of technology. For one, social psychology will be better able to account for the variance of critical social behaviors such as competence, autonomy, social influence, and social isolation. Second, the study of technology will provide a historical perspective for examining changes in social behavior. Finally, the application of social psychological constructs and methods to the study of technology will provide insights that are not available from studies of this topic by economics, philosophy, and political science.     

Walking as a ‘Radicalized’ Critical Psychological Method? A Review of Academic,Artistic and Activist Contributions to the Study of Social Environments

The study of social environments is a neglected site of research not only in psychology, but across academic disciplines ranging from human geography to cultural studies. This paper will review contributions to studying social environments through academic writings, situationism and psychogeographical groups. It will be argued that disorientating walking practices can be used as a means to reflect on experiences of places in order to begin to think how social environments could be radically changed. It is important to question the taken for granted ways that people make sense of urban environments. It is argued that psychogeographic practice can be used to extend qualitative epistemologies and methods to argue for a ‘turn to place’ in psychology and to open up new methods and approaches in critical psychology. Finally, the implications for radicalizing critical psychological research methods will be considered in relation to the current status of critical psychology, which suffers from an apathetic vision of radicalism and criticality.     

Migrants' Integration in Western Europe: Bridging Social Psychology and Political Science

This article presents the possibilities and advantages of integrating social psychology and political science in the study of intergroup relations in diverse societies in Western Europe. Social psychology provides interesting insights in understanding the emotional and cognitive consequences of increased diversity. However, this literature tends to overlook the role of institutional discourses and correlated practices in stimulating or constraining positive intergroup relations. In order to fill these lacunae, the article suggests the integration of social psychology and a ‘political opportunity structure’ approach. This article maintains that the political opportunity structures operating in a context are not only important for understanding actors' mobilisation, as usually maintained in the literature, but also for studying the extent to which change at the micro‐level of social interaction can be stimulated or constrained. We illustrate the arguments of the article with an analysis of the narrative constructions and the correlated practices of integration as adopted by the city councils of Malmö and Bologna. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political Psychology as Discipline and Resource

Around the 1960s, political psychology was developed as a field of knowledge that attempted to interrelate scientific psychology and political phenomena. However, social and academic conditions are very different today. More and more, political psychology is becoming a protagonist, as much in the internal context of psychology as in the external context of its relations with the social world. Thus, political psychology can now be seen as a resource relating psychological knowledge to social practice, and relating psychological processes to social action. Political psychology is the interface that puts psychology and society in contact. The development of political psychology in Spain provides an example of this alternative view of the field.     

Phenomenology and Critical Social Psychology: Directions and Debates in Theory and Research

There has been significant growth in critical approaches to social psychology in recent years. Phenomenological, discursive and psychoanalytically informed perspectives, amongst others, have become increasingly popular alternatives to ‘mainstream’ cognitive social psychology. This paper describes the fundamental philosophy and methodology underpinning phenomenological psychology along with discussion of a number of key issues in qualitative research in social psychology. In particular, I discuss the role of interpretation, the turn to language and need for political engagement within critical social psychology. More recently, there has been a growth in phenomenologically informed narrative theories and methodologies and in this paper I introduce my own development of a critical narrative analysis. In the process I discuss some of the most pressing debates about research within the phenomenological tradition and provide rebuttals, solutions and possible future directions for phenomenological theory and research that may lead to yet greater recognition for this social psychological perspective.     

“Freedom of speech requires actions”: Exploring the discourse of politicians convicted of hate-speech against Muslims

This study explores how politicians convicted of hate-speech against Muslims account for their actions in statements on their Facebook-pages as well as in reported interviews. Taking a critical discursive psychological perspective, the study examines the strategies through which the politicians discursively claim and resist various subject positions, thus managing to construct their hate-speech as everything from trivial mishaps to acts of virtue. The study examines the multifaceted dynamics of these constructions, and shows how elements from the Five Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate are flexibly deployed in the discourse to serve distinct social and political purposes. By allowing the Social Identity and (critical) discursive approaches to challenge and develop each other, the study advances social psychological research on political communication and persuasion, and contributes to the debate on the boundaries between hate-speech and freedom of speech.     

The mirror and the hammer: the politics of resacralization

The paper consists of the opening chapter of Andrew Samuels’ book The Political Psyche, published in 1993, together with a retrospective introduction. In the chapter, the author discussed the possibilities and limitations of applying depth psychological thinking to social and political problematics. He situates the attempt to make such applications within a wider movement to refresh and reform Western political endeavours. He terms this wider project ‘resacralization’. The author cautions against psychological reductionism and a simplistic approach to market‐based capitalism, calling for a transformation of the latter to the degree possible. He links sociopolitical criticism and psychological writings on numinous experience, thereby connecting the worlds of politics and depth psychology without losing their separate and unique qualities.     

Advancing a critical social psychological perspective on women's leadership: A case illustration from the Global South

When applied to the Global South, mainstream positivist approaches to work and organisational psychology impose alien theories of personality (the self) and leadership. In the case of women, they fail to capture the richness of their experiences of life and leadership, which are influenced by the nexus between history, power and marginalisation—for many, even oppression. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the value of a critical social psychological approach, despite its grounding in the Global North discourse, to analyse women's leadership from a cross-cultural context. To illustrate, we provide an empirical example of a Vietnamese woman leader's life-story drawing on the theoretical resources from critical social psychology to interpret her experiences. When viewed from this perspective, women's leadership is understood within a dialogical space, which is prior to and more fundamental than any instrumental reason and technical rationality. It is argued that this approach resists essentialising assumptions about gender and cultural practices of leadership, providing a more liberating means to understand the life and leadership of Vietnamese women. In the final analysis, we argue that this study contributes to the nascent field of critical work and organisational psychology.     

On the Knowledge of Politics and the Politics of Knowledge: How a Social Representations Approach Helps Us Rethink the Subject of Political Psychology

Fifty years ago, Serge Moscovici first outlined a theory of social representations. In this article, we attempt to discuss and to contextualize research that has been inspired by this original impetus from the particular angle of its relevance to political psychology. We argue that four defining components of social representations need to be taken into account, and that these elements need to be articulated with insights from the social identity tradition about the centrality of self and group constructions in order to develop original insights into political psychological phenomena. First, social representations are shared knowledge, and the way interpretations of the world are collectively elaborated is critical to the way people are able to act within the world. Second, social representations are meta‐knowledge, which implies that what people assume relevant others know, think, or value is part of their own interpretative grid, and that collective behavior can often be influenced more powerfully at the level of meta‐representations than of intimate beliefs. Third, social representations are enacted communication, which means that social influence is exerted by the factors that constrain social practices as much as by the discourse that interprets these practices. Fourth, social representations are world‐making assumptions: collective understandings do not only reflect existing realities but often bring social reality into being. Put together, these four components provide a distinctive theoretical perspective on power, resistance and conflict. The added conceptual value of this perspective is illustrated by showing how it allows revisiting ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. We conclude with implications for research practices and discuss how the proposed model of social representations invites us to define new priorities and challenges for the methods used to study political psychological phenomena.     

Differentiated Citizenship and Contextualized Morality

Political theorists, increasingly, are realizing the virtues of contextuality to conceptual analysis. Just as theory may provide useful standards for the assessment of political practices, so may application of theoretical constructs within particular contexts provide a critical corrective to theory. This essay relates work undertaken within sociolegal studies applying a constitutive methodology to such efforts to contextualize political theorizing. The essay describes how the emphasis placed by constitutive theory on locality and meaning entails a contextual analysis. The essay then demonstrates how a constitutive and contextual approach can enhance our understanding of the moral issues surrounding differentiated citizenship policy. While the most obvious cost associated with differentiated citizenship policy is a loss in formal equality, a contextual assessment demonstrates the prospect of an even deeper, though ultimately contingent, moral loss in self-invention.     

Notes for a Critical Personality Psychology: Making Room under the Critical Psychology Umbrella

Inspired by the liberation psychologist Martin‐Baró who provocatively defined personality as that of which individuals can be robbed in conditions of social injustice and research psychologists in training whose appreciation of the possibilities of personality psychology has been limited by the dominance of trait approaches, this paper claims that we need and can practice a critical personality psychology. Conceptual and methodological tools for such an enterprise are identified in two arenas of current research: the study of narratives and new forms of history in personality psychology. Within critical personality psychology, personality is understood to be an expression of (i) a multifaceted organization that includes individual, interpersonal, social, cultural, and political contexts; (ii) individual and social change; and (iii) the moral dimensions of human psychology. Notes on future directions draw on areas of inquiry within and outside personality psychology to insure a place under the critical psychology umbrella.