Psychologization in talk and the perpetuation of racism in the context of the Greek school

Abstract

It is often argued that the rise of psychological sciences has offered a new way of constructing subjectivity. Although this framework was used by institutions for regulatory and administrative purposes, soon it became part of common sense and psychological language and notions began to constitute an interpretative resource for social actors. Researchers argue that often discourses of psychologization have been used both by theorists and lay people to account for intergroup conflict, relegating intergroup processes to interpersonal or intrapersonal issues. In this paper, we examine how parents mobilize psychological notions to account for the behavior of children of immigrants within Greek schools. It is argued that psychological discourse was often used to frame “problematic” behavior as the result of interpersonal or intrapersonal processes. These constructions allowed participants to account for the children of immigrants’ behaviour avoiding accusations of prejudice, while at the same time the role of the Greek dominant group (both as a school institution and as the majority of the school population) in shaping intergroup relations within schools was omitted.