Discursive Psychology is a theoretical and analytical approach used by academics and practitioners alike, widely applied, though often lost within the complicated web of discourse analysis. Sally Wiggins combines her expertise in discursive psychology with her clear and demystifying pedagogical approach to produce a book that is committed to student success. This textbook shows students how to put the methodology into practice in a way that is simple, engaging and practical.

Discursive Psychology is the first collection to systematically and critically appraise the influence and development of its foundational studies, exploring central concepts in social psychology such as attitudes, gender, cognition, memory, prejudice, and ideology. The book explores how discursive psychology has accommodated and responded to assumptions contained in classic studies, discussing what can still be gained from a dialogue with these inquiries, and which epistemological and methodological debates are still running, or are worth reviving. International contributors look back at the original ideas in the classic papers, and consider the impact on and trajectory of subsequent work. Each chapter locates a foundational paper in its academic context, identifying the concerns that motivated the author and the particular perspective that informed their thinking. The contributors go on to identify the main empirical, theoretical or methodological contribution of the paper and its impact on consequent work in discursive psychology, including the contributors’ own work. Each chapter concludes with a critical consideration of how discursive psychology can continue to develop. This book is a timely contribution to the advance of discursive psychology by fostering critical perspectives upon its intellectual and empirical agenda. It will appeal to those working in the area of discursive psychology, discourse analysis and social interaction, including researchers, social psychologists and students.

This guide explains how to conduct a discursive psychology research project. Such research explores how our use of language results in specific beliefs, versions of reality, and social actions.

This book explores how discursive psychology (DP) research can be applied to disability and the everyday and institutional constructions of bodymind differences. Bringing together both theoretical and empirical work, it illustrates how DP might be leveraged to make visible nuanced understandings of disability and difference writ large. The authors argue that DP can attend to how such realities are made relevant, dealt with, and negotiated within social practices in the study of disability. They contend that DP can be used to unearth the nuanced and frequently taken for granted ways in which disability is made real in both everyday and institutional talk, and can highlight the very ways in which differences are embodied in social practices – specifically at the level of talk and text. This book demonstrates that rather than simply staying at the level of theory, DP scholars can make visible the actual means by which disabilities and differences more broadly are made real, resisted, contested, and negotiated in everyday social actions. This book aims to expand conceptions of disability and to deepen the – at present, primarily theoretical – critiques of medicalization.

For over thirty years, discursive psychology has offered a robust challenge to cognitivist approaches to psychology, demonstrating the relevance of discursive practices for understanding psychological topics and social interaction. Matters of embodiment – the visceral, sensory, physical aspects of psychology – have, however, so far received much less attention. This book is the first text to address the theoretical and analytical challenges raised by bodies in interaction for discursive psychology. The book brings together international experts, each of which tackles a different topic area and interactional setting to examine embodiment as a social object. The authors consider the issue of subject-object relations and how ‘inner’ psychological subject-side states are constructed and enacted in relation to object-side states through embodied discursive practices. How do bodily processes become particular kinds of embodiment through and within social interaction? How are bodies psychologised as social objects? Moving beyond dualisms of the subject/object that construct an ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ psychological state, the book pushes forward contemporary theory and analysis within discursive psychology. Discursive Psychology and Embodiment is therefore an essential resource for researchers across the social sciences working within discourse, social interaction, and the ‘turn to the body’.

In the last decade, many diverse streams of thought have come together in an international movement to reject the traditional view that a scientific' psychology must rely on an experimental methodology. Underpinning this movement is the principle that the main characteristics of human life are best understood as produced through discourse. This discursive' psychology has found adherents across the range of psychological disciplines and has ushered in a completely revised understanding of the subject. This volume shows how to put these theoretical and methodological insights to work in the investigation of concrete problems in psychology. The internationally renowned contributors re-examine a range of traditional psychological topics, from decision-making, memory and attribution to emotions, learning and the self, and in the process map out the foundations of a new psychology.

Over the past few decades new ways of conceiving the relation between people, practices and institutions have been developed, enabling an understanding of human conduct in complex situations that is distinctive from traditional psychological and sociological conceptions. This distinctiveness is derived from a sophisticated analytic approach to social action which combines conversation analysis with the fresh treatment of epistemology, mind, cognition and personality developed in discursive psychology. This volume is the first to showcase and promote this new method of discursive research in practice. Featuring contributions from a range of international academics, both pioneers in the field and exciting new researchers, this book illustrates an approach to social science issues that cuts across the traditional disciplinary divisions to provide a rich participant-based understanding of action.