Critical Discursive Psychology Research Articles

In/exclusion in fashion discourse: Are we in or out?

This article analyzes the conceptual framing of inclusion and exclusion in fashion discourse, discussing how women are denied or restricted the access to the bounded space of fashion based on a part of their identity, be it their race, religion, disability, gender identification, body weight, or social class. It relies on the data corpus is 1061 Vogue articles, collected between July 2019 and June 2020 and analyzed qualitatively. The current study complements ample research on the container metaphor in political discourse and aims to open a debate on the role of this metaphorical model in a so far largely overlooked discourse of fashion. Drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Discursive Psychology, I demonstrate how the container metaphor pinpoints the repertoire of inclusivity, problematizes the dichotomous relationship between the center and periphery of the fashion industry, and normalizes roles of insiders and outsiders in fashion.

Mentoring as affective practice

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the potential contributions that an arts mentoring program can make to the support of artists and creative practitioners contending with the challenges of the post-pandemic creative sector. In so doing, it also considers possible criticisms of the efficacy of arts mentoring, given the uncertainty and precariousness that characterise careers in the cultural sector. To explore these ideas, the paper presents an analysis of interview data from research on a recent arts mentoring program in Australia. Utilising the concept of ‘affective practice’ from critical discursive psychology, the paper argues that the benefits of mentoring go beyond practical contributions like skills guidance or ‘gate opening’ by mentors. Additionally, a mentoring program can function as a site in which the ‘feeling experiences’ that derive from the cultural and personal associations of a creative or artistic practice can be reinforced, through the program itself and through the relationship between mentor and mentee, potentially strengthening artistic and creative activities and their practitioners, and thereby perpetuating the survival and growth of contemporary art worlds.

Understanding how gay men construct ‘good’ chemsex participation using critical discursive psychology

ABSTRACT Research to date has focused on the potential issues arising from chemsex and often seeks to uncover what is ‘wrong’ with those who are motivated to engage in chemsex. Critical chemsex studies reaches beyond this harm-orientated focus and instead adopts a social justice approach that recognises chemsex participants as legitimate sexual citizens. The present study – comprising eight interviews with gay men living in Ireland – is situated within this critical research praxis. Using a critical discursive psychology framework, our analysis demonstrates how participants draw on various interpretative repertoires to discursively negotiate chemsex identities in a bid to position themselves in a culturally intelligible manner. Participants deployed three key repertoires, centred around (i) harm, (ii) essentialism, and (iii) ethics. These repertoires are deployed in an interweaving manner to ultimately construct a dynamic, hierarchal continuum of chemsex participants – from flourishing, to flailing. Our analysis demonstrates how chemsex participants construct ‘other’ chemsex users as ‘flailing’ towards the bottom of the continuum by mobilising repertoires that draw upon prevailing moralistic notions of ‘good’ sexual citizenship. We argue that the mainstream construction of chemsex as inevitably harmful is restrictive and produces a deficit understanding of chemsex participants, and discuss the possibilities for discursively reimagining chemsex participation.

All Lives Matter discussions on Twitter: Varied use, prevalence, and interpretive repertoires

AbstractAll Lives Matter (ALM) has emerged as a response to, and critique of, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) anti‐racist movement. ALM has been shown to work to undermine and attempt to deracialise BLM; however, there is a need for a comprehensive understanding of how ALM functions in online interactions. The research questions are therefore: What different ways is ALM used in Twitter debates?, How prevalent are these different uses?, and What function do the different uses of ALM perform in the wider debate around BLM? To address these questions, we employed a mixed‐method approach drawing on topic modelling and critical discursive psychology of Twitter posts using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter. A corpus of 294,217 unique tweets sent by 145,994 unique users was subject to Structural Topic Modelling (STM), which resulted in 60 topics, and from this, a sub‐dataset of 180 tweets was generated for discourse analysis. The STM identified 12 distinct uses of ALM, ranging from direct and even extreme opposition to BLM to criticisms of ALM and support of BLM and anti‐racism messages, both of which are explored in the discourse analysis. Together, the analysis suggests that, at least on Twitter, the ALM hashtag is not one‐dimensional nor a settled debate. Moreover, the Twitter public can use the ALM hashtag to denounce racism and the ideological pretext of ALM.

Lay representations of populism: Discursive negotiation of naturalized social representation

AbstractDespite the importance of naturalized representations for explaining, creating and recreating social reality, little empirical research has examined the resistance to and change in naturalized representations in talk. By approaching populism as a naturalized representation, this article examines the dialogical construction of populism in 55 Finnish lay interviews. Our analysis consists of two parts. First, we conduct a reflexive thematic analysis to identify the meanings of the naturalized representation of populism. Additionally, by relying on work in critical discursive psychology, we perform a more fine‐grained analysis to illustrate how the naturalized representation of populism is used in talk to construct social reality and intergroup boundaries. Second, by relying on critical discursive psychology, we illustrate the discursive strategies that allowed some of our interviewees to contest the naturalized representation of populism in talk. This study offers novel contributions to the existing literature on populism and social representations by analysing the meanings and functions of the term ‘populism’ in lay discourse, responding to the call to combine social representations theory and the discursive approach, and offering insights into the changes in naturalized representations. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

“I *know* all the things I should be doing …”: accounting for mental health and illness in an online mental health discussion forum during the COVID-19 pandemic

BackgroundMental health is highly correlated with a person’s social and economic circumstances, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic made this connection uniquely visible. Yet a discourse of personal responsibility for mental health often dominates in mental health promotion campaigns, media coverage and lay understandings, contributing to the stigmatisation of mental ill-health.MethodsIn this study, we analysed how the concept of ‘mental health’ was discursively constructed in an online mental health peer-support forum in Australia during 2020, the period of the first two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. An approach informed by Critical Discursive Psychology was employed to analyse all posts made to a discussion thread entitled “Coping during the coronavirus outbreak” in 2020, a total of 1,687 posts.ResultsTwo main interpretative repertoires concerning mental health were identified. Under the first repertoire, mental health was understood as resulting largely from the regular performance of a suite of self-care behaviours. Under the second repertoire, mental health was understood as resulting largely from external circumstances outside of the individual’s control. The existence of two different repertoires of mental health created an ideological dilemma which posters negotiated when reporting mental ill-health. A recurring pattern of accounting for mental ill-health was noted in which posters employed a three-part concessive structure to concede Repertoire 1 amid assertions of Repertoire 2; and used disclaimers, justifications, and excuses to avoid negative typification of their identity as ignorant or irresponsible.ConclusionsMental ill-health was commonly oriented to by forum posters as an accountable or morally untoward state, indicating the societal pervasiveness of a discourse of personal responsibility for mental health. Such discourses are likely to contribute to the stigmatisation of those suffering from mental ill-health. There is a need therefore for future communications about mental health to be framed in a way that increases awareness of social determinants, as well as for policy responses to effect material change to social determinants of mental health.

When hope messages become the discursive norm: how repertoires of hope shape communicative capacity in conversations on the circular economy

Environmental communication research often conceptualises hope as an internal state of mind, suggesting that messages focused on hope can be used in strategic communication to foster environmental engagement. In this paper, we critique this individualising approach and instead explore hope discourse as an emergent social phenomenon, focusing on how it is constructed and managed in inspirational meetings about the circular economy. Using critical discursive psychology as a methodology, we identify three interpretative repertoires through which hope is constructed: stronger together, change for real, silver lining. We explore what is accomplished by their use, and discuss the social implications within the meetings and beyond. The repertoires facilitate a positive meeting experience and solidarity amongst participants. However, hope discourse also relies on abstraction which prohibits disagreement, critique, and talk about concrete actions.

Language ideologies in a Finnish university student union’s Facebook communication practices

ABSTRACT This paper examines language ideologies – sets of normative beliefs about language and its speakers – in a Finnish university student union’s Facebook communication practices. Prior research has discussed how today’s Nordic universities appear to be caught in an ideological tension between the preservation of ethnolinguistic nationalism and the pursuit of internationalization through the use of English. We are interested in the case of university student unions in the changing landscape of communication practices today. We analyzed the student union’s Facebook posts using critical discursive psychology. Our analysis identifies the university’s Finnish–English bilingualism as discursively affording an ambiguous kind of inclusion to students as Finnish-speaking/local and English-speaking/international students, and also social media communication as possibly contributing to the inclusion of all students as social media users. We argue that multimodal affordances of social media may act as an alternative discursive resource for inclusive intergroup relations among students in a student organization on an international campus.

Unpacking Gender for Flat Breast Cancer Survivors Assigned Female at Birth: A Methodological Application of Visually Informed, Critical Discursive Psychology

Given the high prevalence rates of breast cancer and mastectomy as recommended treatment, a large number of breast cancer survivors assigned female at birth may face contradicting messages about whether to pursue reconstruction. Survivors desire information outside of standard biased pro-reconstruction messages, with an increase in utilization of online social platforms to learn of the lived experiences of survivors who have gone flat. As breasts are socially constructed symbols connected to femininity, fertility, motherhood, and (hetereo)sexualization, the application of visually informed, critical discursive psychology holds promise as a method for analyzing how survivors “do” gender after going flat. This paper summarizes prior research on messages around reconstruction before diving into how breasts hold sociocultural meanings in relation to gender performance. A preliminary reading of a photo posted on Twitter by Tig Notaro, a comedian who has been public about breast cancer, and a photo posted on Instagram by entrepreneur Jamie Kastelic were analyzed using a visually informed, critical discursive psychology lens. Our preliminary analysis illustrates the utility of this method for understanding how flat survivors assigned female at birth construct gender for both themselves and a social media audience. This paper challenges assumptions regarding what a “healthy” breast cancer survivor looks like and aims to encourage future inquiries into how social media functions as a space where survivors can perform gender online after going flat themselves.

‘Hey, teach these kids to eat their own food!’: Institutional intergroup contact in immigrant mothers' talk

AbstractAlthough informal segregation often persists in multiethnic neighbourhoods, local institutions offering public services may act as an important setting for intergroup contact. Therefore, we studied how immigrant mothers of young children discursively construct institutional intergroup contact with workers of public playgrounds and kindergartens. We conducted longitudinal interviews with 10 immigrant mothers three times over the period of a year in 2 multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods in Helsinki, Finland. Using Critical Discursive Psychology, we analysed respondents' talk about the encounters and identified three interpretative repertoires: ‘contact as asserting rights’, ‘contact as helping’, and ‘contact as cultural rectification’. Our analysis showed how mothers positioned themselves and the workers differently in terms of agency and power in each repertoire. Our findings stress the importance of studying people's own sense‐making of institutional contact, with different roles for participants, and that construction of agency within institutional contact is important for building equal membership in society. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

Discursive analysis of intersectional moral exclusions in online discussions on women to be repatriated to Finland from the Al-Hol camp

ABSTRACT In spring 2019, there was a heated debate in the media concerning the Al-Hol camp in Syria, where a number of women and children were detained. This article explores intersectional dynamics of exclusion in online comments on news items regarding the repatriation of women and children from Al-Hol to Finland. The analytical framework is based on critical discursive psychology combined with an intersectional lens. The analysis distinguished three interpretative repertoires: the repertoire of a foreign threat, the repertoire of neglected maternal obligations, and the repertoire of irrationality. Within these repertoires, three subject positions were also applied to women—the deceitful villain, the bad mother, and brainwashed fools—with two subject positions applied to children—innocent children and future threats. The analysis shows the dialectical nature of positionings through which the Otherness of these women is constructed via the interplay with evaluations of their motherhood and positions applied to other actors, such as Muslim men and Finns. Moreover, the analysis shows how positionings mobilise intersectional categorisations based on gender, age, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and race.

Critical discursive psychology and visual displays of gender

ABSTRACT The growing presence of everyday visual materials, such as social media images and videos, raises new questions around the ways in which identities are made visible in contemporary contexts. ‘Visually informed’ critical discursive psychology can be productively leveraged to analyze the diverse intersections of visuality and gender in daily life. To guide future inquiries in this domain, a brief overview of discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and (visually informed) critical discursive psychology is provided. Applying this methodology to the study of gender, an explicit conceptualization of visual gender displays is detailed alongside complementary analytic objectives suitable for future inquiries. Lastly, three categories of visual features are outlined that could be attended to during close examinations of visual data, using extracts from a previous study to illustrate key points. To that end, scholars can visually investigate ‘micro’ level gender displays as they relate to ‘macro’ systems of inequality- grounded in a critical discursive psychology framework.

App-Hazard Disruption: An Empirical Investigation of Media Discourses on ChatGPT in Educational Contexts

Our paper traces the dominant social imaginaries of ChatGPT in educational contexts as these present in news media discourses. While media plays a central role in shaping the sociotechnical imaginaries we share on specific topics, media texts have thus far been used as the basis for such analysis only in limited instances. To remedy this gap, we apply a critical discursive psychology approach to a sample (N = 143) of news stories and opinion pieces published about ChatGPT in educational contexts in December 2022 and January 2023. Our analysis shows that socially irresponsible technology release tends to operate with relative impunity and lack of regard for social consequences entailed by such technology introduction. The educational sector reported finding itself struggling to address the implications from ChatGPT, in particular whether the central issue pertains to the ‘product’ of such technologies or the face-the-facts necessity of incorporating ChatGPT into educational processes.

English is ‘the language everybody shares’ but it is ‘my native language’: language ideologies and interpersonal relationships among students in internationalizing higher education

ABSTRACT This paper examines the roles of different language ideologies—sets of common-sense beliefs about language and its speakers—in students’ identity construction and negotiation in the context of internationalizing higher education. Along with the increasing diversity of students as English speakers, language ideologies have been critically examined for potential contribution to inequalities among students. I analyze two focus group discussions of students from international English-medium instruction master’s programs at a Finnish university. I explore the students’ talk using critical discursive psychology to illuminate possible intersections between language ideologies and students’ situated identity construction, paying attention to ideological dilemmas alongside students’ identity negotiation. The findings indicate that both emerging and established language ideologies may become relevant to students’ identity construction and negotiation. Possibly, turning students’ attention towards the multilinguality of every student and the specific purposes and characteristics of academic language might contribute to the discursive sustainability of inclusive interpersonal relationships among students.

Jockeying for position: university students’ employability constructions

ABSTRACT As governments and international organisations have pressured universities to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of tertiary education, universities have started to highlight graduate employability as a key driver and measure of university outcomes. This paper contributes to the underutilised processual employability studies by applying the framework of critical discursive psychology to analyse university students’ employability construction. Following this framework, employability is something students do rather than something they have. The empirical study was based on interviews of Finnish students of social science. Analysis of the interviews demonstrated notable variation in the ways in which university students talk about their employability. While some students constructed their employability by positioning themselves as traditional bureaucrats, others constructed their employability by positioning themselves as entrepreneurial agents. Nevertheless, the central point is that some students related ambiguously to both positions and tried to manage the ideological dilemma between stability and security of the bureaucrat position, and variability and risk of the entrepreneurial position. The study calls for better understanding of ways in which students and graduates deal with the dilemmatic nature and requirements of the labour market.

“It’s important to manage our stress”: Mental health advice in the Australian print news media during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened existing concerns about mental health and illness in Australia. The news media is an important source of health information, but there has been little research into how advice about mental health is communicated to the public via the news media. In this study, we examined how advice about building and maintaining mental health was discursively constructed in the news media during the COVID-19 pandemic. A discourse analytic approach informed by critical discursive psychology was employed to analyse 436 articles published in daily newspapers in Australia between 1 January and 31 December 2020, which contained references to mental health and the COVID-19 pandemic. Three main interpretative repertoires were identified – negative emotions are a risk to mental health and must be managed; risky emotions should be managed by being controlled (based around a ‘border control’ metaphor); and risky emotions should be managed by being released (based around a ‘pressure cooker’ metaphor). This study demonstrates that, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, advice constructed negative emotions as risky and problematic; and normalized the habitual management of emotions by individuals through strategies of control and release. Potential implications of such discourses for goals of improving population mental health are discussed.

Creativity: Celebrations and tensions

AbstractIn 1950, the President of the American Psychological Association emphasised the economic and political importance of creativity for US society. His account of creativity exhibits a number of tensions that can be identified in other psychologists' theories and conceptualisations of creativity. This paper considers the tensions from the perspective of critical discursive psychology. In the terms of that approach, the tensions derive from multiple non‐academic discourses around creativity, including popular discourses of creativity and art. The paper argues that conceptualisations of creativity from academic psychology have in turn entered wider discourses, invoked, for example, in recent celebrations of the global sector of the creative and cultural industries (CCI). The tensions within psychology's conceptualisations are significant, however, because they raise questions about the extent to which the psychology of creativity has a common reference and coheres around the study of a single phenomenon.

Masculinities, spatial dialectics, and discursive strategies: reproducing gender inequalities at home – the case of İzmir

The spatial dialectics reveal themselves in gender relations, which reproduce and maintain gender inequalities. This article analyses meaning-making processes around the home space and masculine identities that focus on spatialized gender relations. This research was conducted in the relatively modern city of İzmir, Turkey. The study explores the negotiation of masculine identities at home. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology and identifies interpretative repertoires and subject positions related to men’s accounts of masculine identities, practices, and roles as men at home. Two interpretative repertoires were revealed that positioned men in two contradictory but complementary roles. Men were positioned as the primary responsible person for the home’s public space-related needs and as helpers for domestic chores. Moreover, the ‘help’ discourse was used by men, referring to modernization. Also, various discursive strategies men used to legitimise their limited contributions to domestic chores were revealed. The findings discuss what these discourses accomplish regarding masculine identities, wider power relations, and gendered social practices that maintain them. Such discourses have a substantial role in reproducing and maintaining gender inequalities in the home. Revealing these discourses is important for changing the traditional understandings of gender and everyday discursive practices since discourse and ideology produce each other.

Schools engaged in doom-monitoring students' online interactions and content creation: an analysis of dominant media discourses.

Growing public concern about the safety and security of schools has led many schools and school districts within the United States to hire private companies to monitor students' online interactions and the content they create, including on social media. The use of such technologies supposedly increases schools' awareness of what students are doing online and, thus, helps to identify and prevent potential issues such as mental health problems, cyberbullying, or self-harm that might otherwise go unnoticed. However, there is currently no evidence to support that social media surveillance or content monitoring is able to effectively address these public health and safety issues. Thus, our study explores how the different voices present in the discourse - students, school officials, privacy advocates, and service providers' representatives - justify or condemn the surveillance of student-produced online content in publicly available news media articles. We adopt a critical discursive psychology approach to study news articles, which were published in international media in the last 3 years (2019N=53; 2020N=56; 2021N=77), reporting on the use of digital surveillance technologies targeting student-produced content. Three dominant interpretive repertoires emerged from the analyzed news media articles: 'silenced students, expert adults', 'a solution in search of a problem', and 'the normalization of surveillance for a good cause'. Our findings show that, under the auspices of protecting children, schools are actively engaged in 'doom-monitoring', which is the indiscriminate and inaccurate surveillance of people in anticipation of the next bad thing. The opinions and views of adults, including school officials, vendors, and civil liberties advocates, dominate over the voices of students.

‘Mental Wealth’ and ‘Mental Fitness’: The discursive construction of mental health in the Australian news media during the COVID‐19 pandemic

AbstractIn this study, we analysed how the concept of ‘mental health’ was discursively constructed in the news media in Australia during the first year of the COVID‐19 pandemic. An approach informed by critical discursive psychology was employed to analyse a sample of 436 print and online articles published in daily newspapers between January 1 and December 31, 2020. Three main interpretative repertoires were identified in the data. Together, these repertoires functioned to construct mental health as an internal, individual reservoir of positive emotion, which individuals are responsible for building and maintaining. An ideological dilemma was also observed between mental health as an individual responsibility and mental health as a societal responsibility. This study demonstrates that a discourse of individual responsibility for mental health was prevalent in the news media in Australia, even amid the COVID‐19 pandemic, and highlights the need for communications about mental health to be designed in ways that increase understanding of the social determinants of mental health. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.