"So, you're from Brixton?": towards a social psychology of community

This thesis examines the social psychological significance of 'community', as it is experienced and talked about in Brixton, a culturally diverse area in South London. There are two points of entry into the social psychology of a community: (1) the negotiation of social representations of the community and (2) the co-construction of community identities. The theoretical perspective that I have developed through this research is grounded in the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1984, 1988; Farr, 1987) and draws on other theories of representation (Hall, 1997a), community (Cohen, 995), identity and self-consciousness (Hall, 1991a; Tajfel, 1982; Mead, 1934), stigma (Goffman, 1968) and the media (Thompson, 1995). It is an ethnographic study which combines ongoing participant-observation, 7 focus groups with 44 adolescents aged between 12 and 16, 5 in-depth interviews with deputy-heads of Brixton's schools, a media analysis of a documentary set in Brixton, and follow-up discussions. These accounts are woven together to answer the principal research question: how is `community' lived in Brixton? This study shows that communities emerge as sites of struggle in the negotiation of self-identity, belonging and difference. Community identities are constructed through and against social representations of the community, particularly those in the media. Two competing representations of Brixton - 'Brixton as Diverse' and 'Brixton as Bad' — were found in the same representational field. The data illustrate the different ways in which people affirm, manipulate and contest these ambivalent social representations in order to defend their perspective on Brixton, and so either claim or reject community membership. I examine how these representations both reflect and construct the social reality of Brixton. This reveals the potential of social representations to construct, delimit and empower the living of community. The systematic analysis of social representations of community and community identities demonstrates the pressing need for a social psychology of community

‘Life was a spectacle for her’:Lady Dorothy Nevill as art collector, political hostess, and cultural philanthropist

Lady Dorothy Nevill gained acclaim as a botanist, a political hostess, one of the founding members of the Conservative Primrose League, an art collector, and a supporter of writers, scholars, and artists, many of whom she patronized. Nevertheless, she has been largely overlooked in the history of collecting and her role in Victorian philanthropy has received no attention. This is perhaps further encouraged by the fact that up until the 1860s her husband Reginald Nevill was credited with her art collection, and due to posthumous auctions her collection is now completely dispersed. This article seeks to award Lady Dorothy her rightful place in the history of collecting and situates her within a wider context of women’s engagement with art collecting and cultural philanthropy during this time. It examines the different ways in which she acted in the ‘enlarged public sphere’ of the Victorian art world, uncovering her agency as an art collector, exhibition lender, and museum benefactress

"Are they crazy?": social representations, conformism, and behavior

This is a commentary on certain aspects of norm theory in terms of social representation theory. The aspects are the issue of conformism versus nonconformism, semantic grounding of norms, and change and transmission. It refers to some of the articles collected in the special issue on Advances in Intersubjective Norm Research

From ex-combatants to citizens: connecting everyday citizenship and social reintegration in Colombia

Citizenship can be understood as a form of civic participation and a means of developing social relations with members of the broader community and, therefore, can act as an important means to help reintegrate ex-combatants back into mainstream society. This paper discusses an exploratory research project conducted with a sample of 23 Colombian ex-combatants from non-state armed groups who are current participants of the national programme of reintegration in the city of Bogotá, Colombia. By collecting their views and opinions about what it is like to become reintegrated, we explored the range of social factors that facilitate as well as obstruct practices of citizenship in everyday life and, subsequently, the ways in which this affects their overall experience of reintegration into Colombian society. Drawing on social psychological literature on citizenship and on the theory of social representations, we explored how citizenship is understood and enacted by this group as part of their reintegration process. A thematic analysis of three focus groups highlights an enabling as well as a limiting social context that affects former combatants’ ability to participate as citizens. This paper also contributes to the social psychology of citizenship by studying the experience of reintegration in conflict-affected societies

Reification and the refugee: using a counterposing dialogical analysis to unlock a frozen category

Thousands of individuals each year seek refugee status and the question of who can be accepted requires politicians within democracies to seek a public mandate. Unlike other socio-political categories individuals cannot self-identify as refugee; the category must be bureaucratically conferred. Therefore sustained humanitarian public concern is vital to the acceptance of refugees. This article sets parameters on this public concern. It examines how public narratives reify the refugee category. Showing how this reification constrains the citizenship, integration and opportunities of individuals, now safe, yet continually categorized in everyday public discourse as refugee. Interviews, focus groups (Study 1) and ethnography (Study 2) were conducted in Sweden and the United Kingdom (N = 57). The article introduces a counterposing dialogical analysis where public positioning of refugees is counterposed against dialogue by “refugees” anticipating their positioning. The analysis uncovers an hegemonic social representation of humanitarianism indexing “the refugee” as the passive recipient of help framed by a public narrative diachronically frozen in the initial act of flight. Three objectifying reification processes stabilize the category. “Refugees” in turn employ counter-positional tactics of distancing, compensation and future-orientation. The limited success of these tactics suggest the need to scale up such tactics to collective-level communication strategies. Success of communication strategies requires questioning the underlying function humanitarian-talk serves in creating a sense of European identity. Together these strategies could re-work the temporal features of the refugee category facilitating a repositioning and enabling the emergence of post-refugee narratives

New publication: the social psychology of everyday politics

Newly published book The Social Psychology of Everyday Politics edited by Associate Professor Caroline Howarth and Dr Eleni Andreouli features chapters by PhD candidate Geetha Reddy and Dr Ilka Gleibs, and PhD candidate Sandra Obradovic and Associate Professor Caroline Howarth

Developing a critical agenda to understand pro-environmental actions: contributions from social representations and social practices theories

Debates over the value and compatibility of different approaches to understanding and changing environmental-relevant actions proliferate across the social sciences. This article reviews and discusses some of the (socio-)psychological and sociological approaches in those debates. We will start by critically reviewing the (socio-)psychological perspectives, highlighting two main shortcomings. First, they are often partial in their focus—concentrating on the consumption side of climate-relevant actions and, relatedly in changing these actions at the individual level. They tend to assume that individual change equates to social change and, with that, fail to contextualize ‘anti’-environmental actions in current neoliberal, capitalist societies. Second, they usually present the mainstream (socio-)psychological approaches, which are ontologically individualistic and cognitive, as the only existent ones, therefore neglecting other perspectives within Social Psychology which might actually be (more) compatible with sociological perspectives. We then suggest that Social Representations Theory (SRT), as an ontologically social-psychological approach and a theory of social change, might be reconciled with sociological approaches, such as Social Practices Theory (SPT), in contrast to the more individualistic (socio-)psychological perspectives. After reviewing the main tenets of SRT, its discrepancies and potential synergies with SPT, we discuss how both can be articulated to understand different stages of the social change process toward more environmentally sustainable societies. While SPT might be more suitable to understand stability or how some actions become habitual, SRT might be better equipped to understand how those change, or how individuals and groups negotiate new actions with old ones