Psycho-Social Studies Cluster

Focusing on the relationship between the human subject and the material and social worlds, psychosocial studies question conventional distinctions between these categories, viewing them instead as implicated in each other. Psychosocial studies are characteristically interested in mapping the ways in which social, cultural, historical, and material factors are part of and help to produce subjective and psychological phenomena and, conversely, the ways in which social, cultural and material worlds are made up from phenomena that are, in some measure, subjective and psychological. From a psychosocial perspective neither of these dimensions necessarily precedes the other. They are instead co-produced or mutually constitutive.

The psychosocial cluster within CCIG constitutes one of the leading research groups in the field. Building on the Faculty of Social Sciences’ longstanding and influential tradition of inter-disciplinary work on identity (by, among others, Stuart Hall, Margaret Wetherell and Wendy Hollway), it brings together researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including critical and social psychology, critical race theory, cultural studies, organisational studies, sociology and social policy. Members draw inspiration from a diverse array of theoretical perspectives, among them critical theory, feminism, phenomenology, post-structuralism, discursive and narrative research, process philosophy, and psychoanalysis and group relations.

The cluster has strong international links, hosts, co-hosts or is closely involved with a number of leading journals (European Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminism and Psychology, Journal of Visual Culture, British Journal of Social Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Psychology & Sexuality, Studies in the Maternal) and is active within a range of national and international research networks, including the Psychosocial Studies Network, the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Critical Sexology, and the International Research Group for Psycho-Societal Analysis.

Members research interests

Meg Barker is interested in how social understandings of sex and relationships shape subjective experience, as well as how the everyday experiences of those in sexual communities impact on their social worlds and wider cultural contexts. Specifically she researches therapeutic client experiences of sexual and relationship ‘problems’ and emerging languages and rules of groups that challenge take-for-granted assumptions around sex and relationships.

Jovan Byford is working on a project exploring the dialectical relationship between individual and collective remembering, using, as a relevant example, testimonies of concentration camp survivors collected after the Second World War. This research looks at how individual accounts of the past (resulting from survivors being interpellated and positioned as ‘witnesses’) are mediated by the interactional, cultural and institutional context in which they are produced, while at the same time shaping the broader discourses of collective memory and determining the parameters of the representation of the past in specific historical and political circumstances.

Rose Capdevila’s research takes a trans-disciplinary approach to the construction and transgression of discursive boundaries around identity – in particular political and gender identities. She is also interested in the role and politics of methodology in psychology.

Jean Carabine is interested in exploring creative processes, knowledge production, ways of knowing and experiential learning using psychoanalytical and discursive approaches. Her particular focus is on art-based knowledge and the exploration of knowledge production processes of artistic practice that involves learning through experience and embodied knowing, and art making as research and methodological processes.

Jessica Evans works in the interstices of sociological and psychoanalysis, applying psychoanalytic concepts to the public sphere in the context of the sociology of neo-liberal governance and of ‘networked’ forms of social relationship. Her current work focuses on the ‘unintended’ consequences of social policy within organisational and community settings, the emotional currencies of public policy rhetoric and the unconscious aspects of political spin and political persona.

Janet Fink's research focuses on British cinema in the 1940s, 50s and 60s and its potential for exploring the social and emotional culture of this period. She is currently working on representations of the 'lost child' in popular feature films, tracing how their visual tropes and discursive repertoires constitute the subject of the child in particular ways and the significance of these for policy making and the meanings and practices of parent-child relations.

Laura Harvey is a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology researching a thesis on the negotiation and representation of condom use in the UK. She is interested in the production of mediated sexual knowledges, identities and behaviours.

Andrew Hill’s work addresses questions of visuality, and is particularly concerned with two areas: how the individual's experience of seeing from a first person perspective has functioned in different historical settings; and the relationship between visuality and conflict. These concerns are underpinned by his interest in Lacan's work.

Wendy Hollway is interested in forging a psycho-social approach through empirical work concerned with identity change, specifically the changes involved with women become mothers for the first time. She draws on psychoanalysis to inform an epistemology, that is, to inform ideas about how researchers use their own subjectivities as instruments of knowing and what implications this has for trustworthy and ethical knowledge claims and research practices.

Mary Horton-Salway applies discursive psychology to show how the psychological and the social are constituted in discourse by lay and professional people when they refer to health-related topics. For example, her current study examines how a psychosocial repertoire is drawn upon to constitute identities, attributions and moral arguments in the ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) debate. 

Darren Langdridge develops phenomenological methodologies, particularly involving issues of narrative, power and politics. This involves work across a range of issues in sexualities research including BDSM, LGB parenthood and ethical non-monogamies, which work critically within a phenomenological psychosocial perspective.

Gail Lewis is currently researching the intersecting psychic, social and cultural processes through which subjectivity is constituted, especially in relation to racialised and gendered experience. She traces the multiple and contradictory social and psychic emotional geographies of affiliation and belonging that are inscribed in narratives of experience in various situated contexts including those of organisations.

Jean McAvoy researches how ‘selves’ and ‘others’ are constituted in relational practices, in particular how this connects with the construction and negotiation of moralities, dilemmas, rights and wrongs within the wider context of the autonomous subject of neo-liberal citizenship. Her work explores how accounts of choice in employment, parenting, and interpersonal relations combine with performances of emotion and affect to legitimise or contest particular acts, and to constitute ‘good’ (legitimate) and ‘bad’ (deficient) actors.

Johanna Motzkau’s research draws on the work of Stengers and Deleuze to examine the paradox of the psychosocial instigated by the theoretical and practical implications of concepts of memory and suggestibility that ambiguously raise the question of how we relate whilst also being separate, and how we know while continuously having to perform and reaffirm this knowing in relation to ourselves and others. By exploring how, for example, psychological expertise is used in courts of law to disambiguate memory/suggestibility of witnesses (e.g. child witness practice, questions of false/recovered memories), or the way personal memories of holocaust survivors are expressed and negotiated (and/or rendered speechless), exploring the paradox of the psychosocial opens up new perspectives around questions of subjectification and agency more generally.

Peter Redman works in the tradition of psychoanalytic sociology and cultural studies and is interested in the broad terrain of the psychosocial. His recent publications include articles on post-Kleinian and relational understandings of affect and on the depth-hermeneutic method of psychosocial research inspired by the German analyst and sociologist Alfred Lorenzer.

Stephanie Taylor’s research explores how speakers’ ongoing identity work is shaped by established social meanings and also by the more local discursive resources given by a particular speaker’s personal relationships and interactions. At present, she is researching contemporary creative workers and the potential problems for women workers that derive from the conventionally personalised, individualised nature of a creative identification.

Andreas Vossler is interested in psycho-social views of individual distress as the result of complex iterative processes in terms of relational dynamics at various contextual levels, from the family to broader societal environments. His research focuses on promoting individual and collective health and well-being on the basis of the understanding of individuals within their social worlds and in their contextualised and socially constructed subjectivity.

Margie Wetherell is currently writing on affective practices developing a critical perspective on aspects of the ‘turn to affect’ increasingly found across the social sciences. Her work on affect seeks to integrate accounts of the body with accounts of habitus and personal order and builds on her earlier research on discourse and the psychosocial bases of identity and identification.

Kath Woodward is interested in the processes through which subjectivities are formed in relation to socio-cultural forces, particularly in the context of the gendered and racialised effects of sport. She chooses sport as a field that is especially marked by classificatory systems based on regulatory bodies as well as the enfleshed bodies of the people who participate in all aspects of sport.