Karen Hagan: Critical and Discursive Psychological Approaches to Bullying

Bullying is a broad concept describing a spectrum of abuses of power that function to harm individuals and groups.Much bullying is initiated, conducted and permitted through discourse, so psychological research is shifting to take greater account of the role of language. Wetherell’s Critical Discursive Psychology integrates 'macro-level' social discourses and 'micro-level' interactions. Illustrating this approach with a number of examples, this talk addresses the importance of how acts of bullying are understood and some implications for the design of interventions.