Cristian Tileagă

(Re)writing biography: Memory, identity, and textually mediated reality in coming to terms with the past:

This paper is concerned with how biography, memory, and identity are managed and displayed in a public confession of having been an informer for the Securitate (the former Romanian Communist Secret Police). Drawing on discursive psychology, the analysis reveals how biographical details are produced by drawing upon categorizations of people, context, and events, and organizationally relevant products such as the ‘‘archive,’’ the (Securitate) ‘‘file,’’ ‘‘information notes,’’ and personal notes. It is suggested that constructions of memory and identity are legitimated through a relationship with an organizational and personal accomplishment of accountability. The question guiding the analysis asks not why, but how remembering assumes the form that it does and how, ultimately, it can connect biography, memory, and identity to the wider ideological context. It is shown that a process of (re)writing biography is located in the ‘‘textual traces’’ contained in personal and ‘‘official’’ records. Recollections, dispositions, intentions, and moral character are intertwined with a textually mediated reality in producing the public record of disclosure, and the personal and political significance of what is remembered.

Communism in retrospect: the rhetoric of historical representation and writing the collective memory of recent past

Using a case study of official representation of communism in Romania, this article addresses the rhetoric of historical representation and some of the ways in which the collective memory of communism is managed in the context of how post-communist democracies reckon with former regimes. It specifically centres on the public accomplishment of coming to terms with the past in the ‘Tismăneanu Report’ condemning communism in Romania. Using an ethnomethodologically inspired critical analysis, the article examines how the report and texts supporting it address the issue of how to take the communist era into public consciousness. The shaping of a specific representation of communism and the making of political-moral judgments in the report is legitimated by (1) treating communism as a category of the macro-social and textually mediated reality, (2) constructing the need for a scientific approach, and (3) conceiving communism as Other, alien to national identity and national interest. General implications for the substance and meaningfulness of coming to terms with recent history are discussed.

Cautious morality: Public accountability, moral order and accounting for a conflict of interest

This article draws upon discursive psychology to explore the organization of public accountability in accounting for an alleged conflict of interest in journalism. The analysis focuses on the published record of an interview given by the editorial director of one of the major Romanian daily newspapers on the issue of an assumed conflict of interest involving a senior editor of the same newspaper. The analysis shows how a moral order is constituted by the use of various discursive resources: role and professional incumbency discourse, disposition avowals and doing being fair/ democratic. This is a moral order where adherence to personal ethical principles, professional incumbencies and responsibilities are practically managed in dialogue and publicly displayed. Acting in-role, reporting a general disposition to engage in moral courses of action and making reference to the values of citizenship and democracy are all publicly available discursive resources used in this context to express a cautious moral judgement bounded and constrained by both personal and professional accountability perspectives.

The construction of ethnic minority identity: A discursive psychological approach to ethnic self-definition in action:

The present article intends to examine how ethnic minority group members account for their ethnic identity as part of a series of interviews with young Mapuches on what it means to be Mapuche in contemporary Chilean society. The focus is on the actual accomplishment and display of ethnic self-definition and group identification. We draw on insights from discursive psychology to explore some features of common-sense practical reasoning that ethnic minority group members use to negotiate, self-ascribe or resist a particular sense of identity, and to produce observable and reportable identities. We have a particular interest in illustrating how ethnic self-definition can be seen as the contingent outcome of a practical and interpretive issue for members of society, with a special focus on how ethnic minority identity is constructed through the flexible use of group-defining attributes and characteristics, categories and common-sense categorial knowledge. We suggest that understanding the complex significance and meaning of ethnic self-definition for minority group members is dependent on engaging closely with its occasioned context of production and treating social identities as a feature of how people describe themselves. It is argued that this view of ethnic minority self-definition as a practical and interpretive issue and as a discursive product in action can provide a further contribution to literature of both discursive and intercultural studies of ethnic identification of minority groups, intercultural and interethnic relations.

Communism and the Meaning of Social Memory: Towards a Critical-Interpretive Approach

Using a case study of representations of communism in Romania, the paper offers a sketch of a critical-interpretive approach for exploring and engaging with the social memory of communism. When one considers the various contemporary appraisals, responses to and positions towards the communist period one identifies and one is obliged to deal with a series of personal and collective moral/political quandaries. In their attempt to bring about historical justice, political elites create a world that conforms more to their needs and desires than to the diversity of meanings of communism, experiences and dilemmas of lay people. This paper argues that one needs to study formal aspects of social memory as well as “lived”, often conflicting, attitudinal and mnemonic stances and interpretive frameworks. One needs to strive to find the meaning of the social memory of communism in the sometimes contradictory, paradoxical attitudes and meanings that members of society communicate, endorse and debate. Many of the ethical quandaries and dilemmas of collective memory and recent history can be better understood by describing the discursive and sociocultural processes of meaning-making and meaning-interpretation carried out by members of a polity.

The right measure of guilt: Moral reasoning, transgression and the social construction of moral meanings

Using a discursive and ethnomethodological analytic framework, this article explores the social construction of moral transgression and moral meanings in the context of coming to terms with the recent communist past in Eastern Europe. This article illustrates some significant aspects of everyday uses of morality and the socio-communicative organization of public judgements on moral transgression. The article considers the range of public reactions and commentaries to a public confession of having been an informer for the former Romanian secret police. Moral reasoning around transgression takes several forms: a) invoking everyday psychological categories and morally implicative descriptions associated with identities of persons and actions; b) drawing upon culturally available metaphors and images with roots in Judaeo-Christian ethics and morality; c) using the wider political context of coming to terms with the past as foundation and criterion for moral judgement. This article argues that rather than attempting to analyse moral (public) judgement in abstract, one must focus on the everyday constructions and uses of morality found in social interaction and social responses to moral transgression.

Twenty five years of discursive psychology

This editorial is closed access, it was published in the serial The British Journal of Social Psychology [Wiley-Blackwell

Psychology and history : interdisciplinary explorations

Foreword Kenneth J. Gergen Introduction: psychology and history - themes, debates, overlaps, and borrowings Cristian Tileaga and Jovan Byford Part I. Theoretical Dialogues: 1. History, psychology and social memory Geoffrey Cubitt 2. The incommensurability of psychoanalysis and history Joan Wallach Scott 3. Bringing the brain into history: behind Hunts and Smails appeals to neurohistory Jeremy Burman 4. The successes and obstacles to the interdisciplinary marriage of psychology and history Paul Elovitz 5. Questioning interdisciplinarity: history, social psychology and the theory of social representations Ivana Markova Part II. Empirical Dialogues: Cognition, Affect and the Self: 6. Redefining historical identities: sexuality, gender, and the self Carolyn Dean 7. The affective turn: historicising the emotions Rob Boddice 8. The role of cognitive orientation in the foreign policies and interpersonal understandings of Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937-41 Mark E. Blum 9. Self esteem before William James: phrenologys forgotten faculty George Turner, Susan Condor and Alan Collins Part III. Empirical Dialogues: Prejudice, Ideology, Stereotypes and National Character: 10. Two histories of prejudice Kevin Durrheim 11. Henri Tajfel, Peretz Bernstein and the history of Der Antisemitismus Michael Billig 12. Historical stereotypes and histories of stereotypes Mark Knights 13. Psychology, the Viennese legacy and the construction of identity in Yugoslavia Cathie Carmichael Conclusion: barriers to and promises of the interdisciplinary dialogue between psychology and history Cristian Tileaga and Jovan Byford.

Troubled pasts, collective memory and collective futures

This is a chapter about how nations imagine possible futures in the context of transitional justice and coming to terms with the communist past in Eastern Europe. For post-communist countries engaged in democratic development, the most significant question was that “of the relation of the treatment of the state’s past to its future” (Teitel, 2000, p. 3). This chapter focuses on the condemnation of communism in Romania in the Tismăneanu Report and on how the Report is constructing the image of a collective future around the issue of how to represent the communist era in public consciousness.