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’.

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.

What is critical social psychology? In what ways can social psychology be progressive or radical? How can it be involved in political critique and reconstruction? Is social psychology itself the problem? Critical social psychology offers a confusing array of diverse answers to these questions. This book cuts through the confusion by revealing the very different assumptions at work in this fast growing field. A critical approach depends on a range of often-implicit theories of society, knowledge, as well as the subject. This book will show the crucial role of these theories for directing critique at different parts of society, suggesting alternative ways of doing research, and effecting social change. It includes chapters fr

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact.

Discourse studies, the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts, is a fast-moving and increasingly diverse field. With contributions from leading and upcoming scholars from across the world, and covering cutting-edge research, this Handbook offers an up-to-date survey of Discourse Studies. It is organized according to perspectives and areas of engagement, with each chapter providing an overview of the historical development of its topic, the main current issues, debates and synergies, and future directions. The Handbook presents new perspectives on well-established themes such as narrative, conversation-analytic and cognitive approaches to discourse, while also embracing a range of up-to-the-minute topics from post-humanism to digital surveillance, recent methodological orientations such as linguistic landscapes and multimodal discourse analysis, and new fields of engagement such as discourses on race, religion and money.

This book brings together leading metaphor researchers from a number of disciplines to unite the field of metaphor theory.

The 'body' and 'discourse' seem diametrically opposed, but we interact with our bodies and represent ourselves and our relationships in bodily terms. This volume integrates new studies by leading researchers in sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology and cultural theory. It explores the many interfaces of body and discourse, organized under three main themes: the body as an interactional resource; ideological representations of the body; and discursive constructions of the body in normal and pathological contexts.

Innovative research requires courageous methods. With this in mind, Courageous Methods in Cultural Psychology invites students and post-graduate researchers to develop methods that will let them grasp phenomena of interest more fully. Readers will learn how to use established methods, and may be asked to develop them further by combining single steps of extant procedures, or by taking a completely new approach to data collection and analysis. In this book, diverse researchers present projects in which they have tried to do just that. A comprehensive process — from narrowing down research questions to collecting and analyzing data — is given in detail, followed by critical reflections on how well the authors have understood and shared complex realities. Project presentations are framed by theoretical chapters that deal with the challenges and opportunities of cultural psychology and interdisciplinary research. Courageous Methods in Cultural Psychology is sure to inspire and encourage those who wish to venture on new roads “into the wild.”

How can ideas about the social construction of reality be reconciled with the material and embodied aspects of our being? In what ways can a realist framework inform social constructionist research? What are the limits of social constructionism? This accessible text draws together for the first time a wide range of emerging issues, ideas and discussions in constructionist psychology. It shows how these issues are relevant to everyday life, using carefully-chosen examples to illustrate its arguments, and provides a coherent and challenging introduction to the field. The book explores the growing conviction that dominant 'discursive' trends in social constructionism - which deal with the analysis of language and discourse to the exclusion of the material world, embodiment, personal-social history, and power - are inadequate or incomplete and risk preventing social constructionism from maturing into a viable and coherent body of theory, method and practice. In highlighting what are seen as deficiencies in current constructionist approaches, it inevitably takes a somewhat critical stance. However, the contributing authors are committed to a constructionist analysis of the human condition - into which they seek to reintegrate the material and embodied aspects of our nature. As a result, the completion of social constructionism is brought a step closer and its continued importance is underlined.

A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation. While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought.