An intriguing inquiry indeed.
John has invoked an interesting line of thought which engages process
orientations to these questions. In addition to the work previously
cited I would add John Shotter's (2010) recent deliberations on the
matter. In placing attention on prospective ways of being his account
resonates for me as a researcher-practitioner keeping in view how it is
psychologists engage and co-constitute people in joint action.
From this discussion I could also preview an edition of the BJSP due
out at the end of the year wherein Jonathan Potter replies to an earlier
paper of mine that looked to distinguish epistemological and ontological
forms of constructionism. Jonathan's paper is already available via the
BJSP website for those interested.
Elaine, importantly your questions are as much about how critical
psychological approaches are defined as they are about what critical
psychologies can do.
Best wishes
Tim
Corcoran, T. (2009). Second nature. British Journal of Social
Psychology, 48, 375-388.
Potter, J. (in press). Contemporary discursive psychology: Issues,
prospects, and Corcoran's awkward ontology. British Journal of Social
Psychology.
Shotter, J. (2010). Movements of feeling and moments of judgement:
Towards an ontological social constructionism. International Journal of
Action Research, 6, 1-27.
Tim Corcoran PhD
Lecturer in Educational Psychology
Director MA in Globalising Education
Department of Educational Studies
University of Sheffield
388 Glossop Road
Sheffield UK
S10 2JA
Tel: 44 (0) 114 222 8185
Fax: 44 (0) 114 279 6236
John Cromby said the following on 20/07/2010 08:57:
> Nice question Elaine.
>
> Critical psychology is not monolithic, so it probably all depends which
> strand or tendency you have in mind.
>
> For example, the movement known as German Critical Psychology, based
> upon Klaus Holzkamp's work, is a fully worked-out ontology. It
> reconstructs basic psychological categories (motivation, cognition etc)
> and replaces them with others (e.g. subjective possibilities, action
> potence) derived from a thorough (dialectical) analysis of evidence.
> Most of it is still only available in German, but see Tolman (1994) for
> an excellent English summary.
>
> By contrast, the kind of critical psychology that focuses solely on
> discourse and narrative is more slippery. This strand shows how
> phenomena get worked up in language and interaction, but frequently
> tends to stop there. This has the effect of challenging the primacy of
> cognition as an individual process in the head, and to this extent is
> critical of the dominant mainstream approach. But it replaces
> disembodied individual cognition with disembodied conversation. Like
> cognitive psychology, then, it largely ignores social and material
> circumstances. It dismisses embodied materiality as subordinate or
> irrelevant to discourse (or even as a mere effect of it) and offers a
> restrictive view of sociality confined only to what is said, whilst
> ignoring the mediating influence of all of the processes, phenomena and
> objects that make any saying possible. Its version of the social tends
> to be confined to what occurs between small numbers of people, and to
> this extent - like the micro-sociology that informs it - it tends to
> omit any consideration of politics and power. In the heated debate about
> realism and relativism that accompanied the rise of this form of
> psychology, some claimed that it was a new conversational ontology but
> the majority ultimately positioned it as epistemological (see for
> example Edwards, Ashmore & Potter, 1995; Edley 2002).
>
> Foucault's work inspired a psychological strand of discourse analysis
> concerned explicitly with identifying the workings of power and how they
> create subjectivities, ways of being that (re) produce structures of
> domination. To the extent that this work engages with the actuality of
> these ways of being it is ontological, but the work tends to focus on
> subjectivity as a position or category which can be taken up - rather
> than with embodied subjectivity, the actual experience of being a
> subjectively-aware embodied creature in a material and social world. To
> this extent it gives us some ways of knowing about how subjective
> experience is formed - epistemology - but says relatively little about
> the actuality of embodied subjectivity - ontology. But it does offer
> some purchase on power and domination so is often far more critical.
>
> There have been a few attempts to produce a 'critical realist social
> constructionism': I've written on this, as have a handful of others (Ian
> Parker, Carla Willig, Wendy Sims-Schouten and Sara Riley). There has
> also been some work using the notion of social co-constitution rather
> than social construction: treating the psychological as not just
> constructed in discourse but as co-constituted: through language and
> discourse, but also through the workings of bodies, materiality and
> power relations (me again, and Dave Harper). All of this work is, or
> strives to be, ontological.
>
> There's also the work of Fox & Prilletensky, which I think is hard to
> categorise, not least because it amalgamates elements of many of the
> above tendencies.
>
> Recently, some people associated with critical psychology have begun to
> develop an approach to psychology based in process philosophy. This has
> the effect of undercutting distinctions between subject and object - and
> hence between (amongst other things) epistemology and ontology. Its
> early yet to say what impact this work will ultimately have, but it
> offers a strikingly different perspective on your question: see Stenner
> 2008, Brown & Stenner, 2009.
>
> In my view all of what I've said here is factual - but I would say that,
> wouldn't I? Others are likely to disagree with some or all of it.
>
> Happy thinking!
>
> J.
>
> Brown, S. D., & Stenner, P. (2009). Psychology Without Foundations:
> history, philosophy and psychosocial theory. London: Sage Publications.
> Cromby, J. (2004). Between constructionism and neuroscience: the
> societal co-constitution of embodied subjectivity. Theory and
> Psychology, 14(6), 797-821.
> Cromby, J., & Harper, D. (2009). Paranoia: a social account. Theory and
> Psychology, 19(3), 335-361.
> Edley, N. (2002). Unravelling Social Constructionism. Theory &
> Psychology, 11 (3), 433-441.
> Edwards, D., Ashmore, M., & Potter, J. (1995). Death and Furniture: the
> rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom-line arguments against
> relativism. History of the Human Sciences, 8, 25-49.
> Fox, D. & Prilletensky, I. (1997). Critical Psychology: an introduction.
> London, Sage Publications
> Parker, I. (1992). Discourse Dynamics. London: Routledge.
> Sims-Schouten, W., Riley, S., & Willig, C. (2007). Critical Realism in
> Discourse Analysis: A Presentation of a Systematic Method of Analysis
> Using Women's Talk of Motherhood, Childcare and Female Employment as an
> Example Theory and Psychology, 17, 101-124.
> Stenner, P. (2008). A.N.Whitehead and Subjectivity. Subjectivity, 22,
> 90-109.
> Tolman, C. (1994). Psychology, Society, Subjectivity: an introduction to
> German Critical Psychology. London: Routledge.
> Willig, C. (1999). Beyond Appearances: a critical realist approach to
> social constructionist work. In D. J. Nightingale, Cromby, J. (Ed.),
> Social Constructionist Psychology: a critical analysis of theory and
> practice (pp. 37-51). Buckingham: Open University Press.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Elaine Douglas wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> In a recent 'moment of geekness' I found myself pondering the question
>> - Is critical psychology epistemological or ontological?
>> In brief:
>>
>> * I consider it to be epistemological as I have found it to
>> encouraged me to question knowledge: what is it; how has it been
>> constructed/derived/etc etc.
>> * However, I also find it ontological as it questions the accepted
>> notions of being, for example, the accepted notions of being
>> normal vs abnormal.
>>
>> Is it both? Neither? Am I just thinking too much? ;o)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Elaine
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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