This introduction to discursive psychology uses discourse analytic terms to examine some of psychology's most fundamental concepts. Taking memory and attribution, central notions in cognitive and social psychology respectively, the book shows the way that their compartmentalization and their failure to theorize adequately about the way language is used in everyday social practices has led to important weaknesses. "Discursive Psychology" reformulates these central issues of language and mind as social practices realized in talk and text. The authors feature detailed discussion of recent political discourse with a particular focus on media disputes involving British Chancellor Nigel Lawson and ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; this is supplemented with an exploration of examples from the Watergate tapes, the Iran Contra hearings, media coverage of the Gulf War, as well as informal everyday talk. The book is intended for academics and postgraduate students in cognitive and social psychology, communication studies, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology.
The central project of this volume is a reappraisal of some of the great debates in psychology in the light of recent theoretical and empirical developments of recent years. The author reviews a range of thought and research to demonstrate how the dominant cognitive approach to pscyhology has failed. He makes a case that language is best understood as a kind of activity, as discourse. The argument draws upon enthomethodology, conversation analysis, linguistic philosophy, and social studies of science. These influences underpin an intellectual survey ranging across cognitivism. discursive psychology, shared knowledge, categories and metaphor, emotion and narrative. The emphasis throughout is on the value of close empirical study of text and talk, through which the topics of mind, world and "who we are" are all seen as "ways of talking".
The central project of this volume is a reappraisal of some of the great debates in psychology in the light of recent theoretical and empirical developments of recent years. The author reviews a range of thought and research to demonstrate how the dominant cognitive approach to pscyhology has failed. He makes a case that language is best understood as a kind of activity, as discourse. The argument draws upon enthomethodology, conversation analysis, linguistic philosophy, and social studies of science. These influences underpin an intellectual survey ranging across cognitivism. discursive psychology, shared knowledge, categories and metaphor, emotion and narrative. The emphasis throughout is on the value of close empirical study of text and talk, through which the topics of mind, world and "who we are" are all seen as "ways of talking".
Challenging the traditional view of memory as the product and property of individual minds, "Collective Remembering" investigates remembering and forgetting as socially constituted activities. The starting point for all the authors is a conceptualization of remembering and forgetting as forms of social action. Individual memories cannot be understood as "internal mental processes" occurring independently of the interpretative and communicative practices that characterize a particular society or culture. Individuals "read", account for and negotiate their memories within the pragmatics of social life. The book also explores the collective processes through which communities' social memories are created, sustained and transformed - in families, other groups and cultures, and organizations. They examine the ways in which what is to be remembered - or forgotten - can become rhetorically and ideologically contested domains for the "possession" of the past, present and future. The social character of memory is a focus of growing interest across a range of disciplines, including psychology, history and historical geography, linguistics and communication studies, sociology and social theory.
