Cristian Tileaga

Discourse, Dominance and Power Relations Inequality as a Social and Interactional Object

This article focuses on some of the issues that arise when examining social inequality and similar notions such as dominance or group superiority as participants’ concerns. It emphasizes the importance of understanding constructions of inequality in terms of how they are (1) situated, constructed and invoked in talk; and (2) oriented to and part of actions and ideological practices. These concerns are illustrated with an example from an interview with majority group members on ethnic issues. This shows how particular orientations to and descriptions of inequality are constructed and what they might be doing. Implications for the study of the discursive construction and representation of social inequality in talk and the nature of inequality as an object in interaction are discussed.

Accounts of a troubled past: psychology, history and texts of experience

The article considers the contribution that discursive psychology can make to the study of accounts of a troubled past, using, as relevant examples, testimonies of Holocaust survivors and confessions of collaboration with the secret police in communist Eastern Europe. Survivor testimonies and confessions of former informants are analyzed as instances of public remembering which straddle historical and psychological enquiries: they are, at the same time, stories of individual fates, replete with references to psychological states, motives, and cognitions, and discourses of history, part of a socially and institutionally mediated collective struggle with a painful, unsettling, or traumatic past. Also, the examples point to two different ways in which archives are relevant to the study of human experience. In the case of Holocaust survivor testimony, personal recollections are usually documented to be systematically archived and made part of the official record of the past, while in the case of collaboration with the security services, it is the opening of the ‘official’ archives, and the fallout from this development, that made the confessions and public apologies necessary. The article argues that discursive psychology’s emphasis on remembering as a dynamic, performative, and rhetorical practice, situated in a specific social and historical context, offers a particularly productive way of exploring the interplay between personal experience and the institutional production of historical knowledge, helping to address some of the challenges encountered by psychologists and historians interested in researching accounts of troubled past.

The nature of prejudice: society, discrimination and moral exclusion

This is a book about the diversity and intensity of prejudices against Romani people in a liberal, progressive, democratic, enlarged Europe. This is a book about a European dilemma - how to reconcile the European creed of law, justice and freedom for all, with social and political practices that exclude, debase, degrade, Romani people. This book proposes a critical reframing of understanding prejudice and racism in society: a shift from prejudice as antipathy to prejudice as harm inflicted by indignity. Although social psychology has perhaps the most respected and the most successful tradition of scientific analysis of social issues and social problems, the investigation of prejudices that stem from the societal transformation, diminution or denial of moral worth of human beings (and the various conditions and contexts that create and promote it) remains a marginal concern. Insights from dynamic and influential intellectual currents in social sciences can reinvigorate and reorient a renewed social psychology of racism. By opening intellectual dialogues with kindred fields social psychologists can create broader foundations for the exploration of the various, active, paradoxes lodged at the heart of the social expression of prejudice in liberal democracies.

Introduction: the evolution of discursive psychology: from classic to contemporary themes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Tileaga, C. and Stokoe, E. (eds.) Discursive Psychology: Classic and Contemporary Issues on 28th Aug 2015, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9780415721608Edwards’ paper, ‘Categories are for talking’ (1991), is a critical dissection of the static role of categories as conceived in traditional Cognitive Psychology and the then-recent work of Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987) through the use of Harvey Sacks’ (1974; 1992) work on membership categorisation. Edwards uses Sacks to take aim at the prominent theoretical and methodological trends at the time, seeking to liberate members’ category work from ironically external conceptions of a shrouded realm located inside the head. However, while the focus for Edwards was on psychology, his detailed under standing of Sacks’ work served to open a conceptual space for those work ing in discursive psychology to engage with members categorisation work as fundamental to the epistemological and methodological repertoires of Discursive Psychology (DP) in ways that ally with the emergence of Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA: Eglin and Hester, 1992; Watson,1994; Hester and Francis, 1994). In the discussion below we focus on how the paper shows three areas of intersection in the emergence of DP and MCA. First, we outline how the initial use of Sacks’ category work in the paper was directed towards psychological topics at a time when his ideas were largely confined to the sociological fields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Second, we trace Edwards’ work to embed Sacks’ categorial work as an analytic method for DP while running parallel to the emergence and development of MCA. Finally, we situate the contemporary influence of Edwards’ paper and use of Sacks’ work in the creation of a rich confluence and openness to ideas that have become a hallmark of the contemporary DP approach – an approach that not only incorporates a deep understanding of Sacks’ categorisation work but, in turn, contributes significantly to the further development of MCA. 6506 DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY-A_234x156 mm 31/05/2015 10:21 Page 181