Social Discursive Psychology Research Articles

An authentic feeling? Religious experience through Q&A websites

As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences.

Recursos pragmático-retóricos de las narrativas de queja para la construcción social de la identidad de mujeres desplazadas por la violencia política en Colombia

The displaced women by the political violence in Colombia not only face this human rights abuse, but they are also exposed to a poverty-stricken and they suffer stigma from the ‘reception’ communities. This investigation trying to identify the rhetoric- discursive relations of the narrative processes of the identity construction, and the approach of interactional positioning in the conversational context of an interview research. This study is based on the onto-epistemological budgets and theoretical - methodological bases of the Social Discursive Psychology, and on the approach of interactional positioning of Bamberg (1997). The sample is shaped by 17 semi-structured interviews; these are ordered thematically as statements of personal, vivid experiences of the process of the political displacement. Among the most important conclusions of this study is the one based on the main resources that, in order to build their identity, narrators used through their narratives of ‘complaint’ (Gunthner, 2007). From this point of view, one might think that the widespread deployment of narrative, pragmatic, rhetorical and evaluative resources depends on the interactional goal of producing partner alignment in narratives of complaint. These preferred resources are: direct speech, using historical present tense and various evaluative resources. The narratives are taken as the main areas where co-conversationalists seek and find ways to mitigate the 'interactive problem' and make a picture of themselves in ways that are useful interactively. The narratives are understood as the principal territories where the co-conversationalists look and find forms to mitigate the 'interactive problem' and shape an image of themselves interactively useful.