Cristian Tileaga

Loughborough University | Lough · Department of Social Sciences

Over the past twenty five years discursive psychology has become an influential field in its home discipline of psychology, as well as in many other academic disciplines, with national and international impact. This is the first collection that systematically and critically appraises its foundational, classic studies, exploring central concepts in...

This book provides an introduction to political psychology through a focus on European politics and topics. It describes a style of doing political psychology in Europe that has developed out of dialogue with as well as critique of North American approaches. By emphasising the theoretical and methodological diversity of political psychology, the bo...

As disciplines, psychology and history share a primary concern with the human condition. Yet historically, the relationship between the two fields has been uneasy, marked by a long-standing climate of mutual suspicion. This book engages with the history of this relationship and possibilities for its future intellectual and empirical development. Br...

Using a case study of representations of communism in Romania, the paper offers a sketch of a critical-interpretive approach for exploring and engaging with the social memory of communism. When one considers the various contemporary appraisals, responses to and positions towards the communist period one identifies and one is obliged to deal with a...

This paper presents a discursive and sociocultural approach to the rhetoric of ideological transgression in the archives of the Securitate (the infamous Romanian communist secret police) during the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1948–65) and Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965–89) periods. First, we explore Securitate’s discursive practices of defining and responding...

This article explores some notable uses of psychological language in the Securitate archives. We examine Securitate files concerning Constantin Vaman, a suspected legionary subjected to surveillance work by the Securitate. This article seeks to show how Securitate activities, particularly the writing of informer notes and operatives’ reports, are t...

In this paper, we explore the potential of short-term ethnography in a collaborative and participatory research project on experiences with and perceptions of migration from fieldwork with Roma groups in north-western Transylvania. We discuss particularly the challenges we encountered in engaging Roma women in terms of existing cultural and gender...

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the book, its scope and argument. We discuss the notion of political communication and its varied, occasionally contested, meaning in various academic fields. In particular we highlight the part played by discursive psychology in this debate. We conclude by arguing that discursive perspectives to po...

Since its inception in 1987, Discursive Psychology (DP) has developed both methodologically, for instance by drawing closer to Conversation Analysis, and theoretically, by building a body of knowledge which outlines the discursive accomplishment of mind-world relations. One of DP’s contributions to psychology consists in the respecification of main...

This paper explores the ways in which national governments address the social inclusion of disadvantaged and disenfranchised groups in official strategy documents of the state. Data for this study come from a corpus of four key government strategy papers concerning Roma inclusion published by the Romanian Government between 2001 and 2015. This pape...

The aim of this paper is to discuss how social psychology might go about studying social hostility in public life that goes beyond mere disagreement on political matters. The paper addresses the case of online misogyny against women active in public life. In the context of a profound coarsening of political debate in Britain and elsewhere, women wh...

This article focuses on the argumentative role of derisive laughter in broadcast political debates. Using Discursive Psychology (DP) we analyze how politicians use derisive laughter as an argumentative resource in multiparty interactions, in the form of debates about the U.K. and the European Union. Specifically, we explore how both pro- and anti-E...

Romani voices across diverse communities remind us of the daily struggle of Roma communities with destitution and racism. This paper argues that although national strategy documents aim to include Roma people within the broader society, they continue to exclude the perspectives of Romani women by drafting them in a non-participatory manner.

This is a chapter about the contribution of discursive psychology to researching social practices of avoidance (gaps, silences, ambivalence) in contexts of rapid social change. I open the chapter with a description and discussion of discursive psychology’s main tenets. I then move on to explore the production of the essence of the communist social...

Romania has undergone a radical, yet troubled transition to democracy in the last 20 years. Successive post-1989 governments have drawn on a notion of collective memory that reflected both progressive arguments for change and facing the past and conservative arguments of putting the past to rest.

members of societies in acute social change are not only (and perhaps not even) experiencing a liberation of their memory; they are scrambling to construct new and acceptable identities for themselves, ones which will be compatible with the changed world in which they now live. (2000, p. 181)

This chapter looks at everyday meanings of morality in the public sphere in public responses/reactions to alleged transgressive behavior—having collaborated with the Securitate. It explores the uses and functions of lay versions of morality and various interpretive procedures and socio-cultural resources of interpretation that people mobilize. As I...

Since Ruti Teitel published her influential book in 2000, transitional justice has become established as a flourishing field of research and societal impact. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the social and political experience of post-communist countries with transitional justice has provided a natural laboratory for exploring a wide rang...

This chapter first introduces basic features of discursive social psychology. It then goes on to discuss the contribution of discursive psychology (DP) to researching contested and troubled pasts. Finally, the chapter discusses some of the key tenets of an emerging interdisciplinary dialogue between DP and history.

The question ‘what does coming to terms with the past mean?’ is one of the most puzzling questions in the social sciences. For some, like Theodor W. Adorno, the matter of coming to terms with the past is ‘essentially … a matter of the way in which the past is called up and made present: whether one stops at sheer reproach, or whether one endures th...

This is a chapter that deals with what Kansteiner has called ‘rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics’ (2002, p. 179). These rules of engagement refer primarily to the distinction between collective and cultural memory and to other, selected aspects that pertain to what is usually described as politics of memory (Stan 2013)...

In this chapter I continue my focus on the particular contribution of discursive psychology (DP) to interdisciplinary scholarship on the critical reconstruction of the communist past in Eastern Europe. I consider issues related to the role of archives in remembering and the analysis of the psychological language of documentary records, particularly...

Please confirm if hierarchy of section headings is correctly identified and given.

This is a chapter about how nations imagine possible futures in the context of transitional justice and coming to terms with the communist past in Eastern Europe. For post-communist countries engaged in democratic development, the most significant question was that “of the relation of the treatment of the state’s past to its future” (Teitel, 2000,...

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/cristian-tileag-salomea-popoviciu/where-next-for-migrant-roma-communities-post-brexit

This book explores the contribution of discursive psychology and discourse analysis to researching the relationship between history and collective memory. Analysing significant manifestations of the moral vocabulary of the Romanian transition from communism to democracy, the author demonstrates how discursive psychology can be used to understand so...

This special section considers the relevance of a reflexive engagement with archives in psychology, and explores the value of archives as a resource for empirical inquiry and scholarship. The contributions offer reflective commentaries on the potential and limitations of working with (and within) archives. They also highlight the range of theoretic...

The article considers the contribution that discursive psychology can make to the study of accounts of a troubled past, using, as relevant examples, testimonies of Holocaust survivors and confessions of collaboration with the secret police in communist Eastern Europe. Survivor testimonies and confessions of former informants are analyzed as instanc...

Social psychologists, in dialogue with scholars from kindred fields, should strive to develop critical analyses of social, cultural, and political processes that justify and perpetuate racism and indignity. This chapter proposes an extension of current theorizing in the social psychology of racism toward the study of how racism is propagated and su...

This book offers a critical synthesis of social psychology’s contribution to the study of contemporary racism, and proposes a critical reframing of our understanding of prejudice in European society today. Chapters place a special emphasis on the diversity and intensity of prejudices against Romani people in a liberal, progressive, decent, enlarged...

The article offers a critical examination of "borrowing" as a form of interdisciplinary engagement between psychology and history. This is where specific insights from one discipline are used (often selectively) by the other to shed light on a specific problem regarding experience, human motivation, or behavior. Using two studies on the social psyc...

This entry focuses on accounts as a pervasive dimension of social accountability in interpersonal and public communication. It focuses on properties of account giving and soliciting in natural interactions, research and news interviews, and the public sphere. The entry closes by arguing that researching accounts in language and social interaction,...

To appear in Antaki, C. and Condor, S. (Eds) Rhetoric, ideology and social psychology: Essays in honour of Michael Billig (Explorations in Social Psychology Series). London: Routledge

This article was published in the journal, Discourse & Society [© SAGE Publications]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926505054938 This article examines the particulars of extreme prejudiced discourse about ethnic minorities in a Romanian sociocultural context. It concentrates on a detailed analysis of a single...

This article was published in the journal, Discourse & Society [© SAGE Publications]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926508088965 This article examines the production and management of an ideological representation of a specific political `event': the Romanian `revolution' of 1989. A critical discursive psycho...

Using a case study of official representation of communism in Romania, this article addresses the rhetoric of historical representation and some of the ways in which the collective memory of communism is managed in the context of how post-communist democracies reckon with former regimes. It specifically centres on the public accomplishment of comin...

Using a discursive and ethnomethodological analytic framework, this article explores the social construction of moral transgression and moral meanings in the context of coming to terms with the recent communist past in Eastern Europe. This article illustrates some significant aspects of everyday uses of morality and the socio-communicative organiza...

This editorial is closed access, it was published in the serial The British Journal of Social Psychology [Wiley-Blackwell © The British Psychological Society]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.2012.02096.x

As disciplines, psychology and history share a primary concern with the human condition. Yet historically, the relationship between the two fields has been uneasy, marked by a long-standing climate of mutual suspicion. This book engages with the history of this relationship and possibilities for its future intellectual and empirical development. Br...

As disciplines, psychology and history share a primary concern with the human condition. Yet historically, the relationship between the two fields has been uneasy, marked by a long-standing climate of mutual suspicion. This book engages with the history of this relationship and possibilities for its future intellectual and empirical development. Br...

This paper is concerned with how biography, memory, and identity are managed and displayed in a public confession of having been an informer for the Securitate (the former Romanian Communist Secret Police). Drawing on discursive psychology, the analysis reveals how biographical details are produced by drawing upon categorizations of people, context...

This paper highlights some of the issues that arise when focusing on inequality (and similar notions) as participants' concerns. It emphasises the value of understanding constructions of inequality in terms of how they are (a) oriented to action; (b) situated (sequentially, institutionally, rhetorically); and (c) constructed from discursive resourc...

El presente artículo se propone examinar cómo los miembros de un grupo étnico minoritario dan cuenta de su identidad étnica, como parte de una serie de entrevistas con adolescentes mapuches acerca de qué significa ser mapuche en la sociedad chilena contemporánea. La atención está puesta sobre la realización y exhibición de la autodefinición étnica...

The present article intends to examine how ethnic minority group members account for their ethnic identity as part of a series of interviews with young Mapuches on what it means to be Mapuche in contemporary Chilean society. The focus is on the actual accomplishment and display of ethnic self-definition and group identification. We draw on insights...

This paper presents a discursive analysis of a political news interview as a site for the interactional organization of the public constitution of recent past. In a context of commemoration and finding out the truth about the past, the focus is on how the collective memory of socio-political events and political accountability is managed and what d...

This article draws upon discursive psychology to explore the organization of public accountability in accounting for an alleged conflict of interest in journalism. The analysis focuses on the published record of an interview given by the editorial director of one of the major Romanian daily newspapers on the issue of an assumed conflict of interest...

It can be sensibly argued that transformations of social, political and moral frameworks for constructing personal and political subjectivities have been taking place in a variety of forms and with different effects across a range of Eastern European contexts. In order to understand and describe individual experiences of social change, researchers...

This paper is concerned with the social organization of collective memory and representations of history in the context of how post-communist democracies reckon with former regimes. It specifically centres on the textual accomplishment of coming to terms with the past in the 'Tismăneanu Report' condemning Communism in Romania. The focus is on how t...

This paper focuses on some of the issues that arise when one treats notions such as depersonalization, delegitimization and dehumanization as social practices. It emphasizes the importance of: (a) understanding depersonalizing, delegitimizing and dehumanizing constructions as embedded in descriptions of located spatial activities and moral standing...

This paper focuses on some of the issues that arise when one treats notions such as depersonalization, delegitimization and dehumanization as social practices. It emphasizes the importance of: (a) understanding depersonalizing, delegitimizing and dehumanizing constructions as embedded in descriptions of located spatial activities and moral standing...

This article focuses on some of the issues that arise when examining social inequality and similar notions such as dominance or group superiority as participants’ concerns. It emphasizes the importance of understanding constructions of inequality in terms of how they are (1) situated, constructed and invoked in talk; and (2) oriented to and part of...

This article investigates the particulars of prejudiced and moral exclusion discourse about ethnic minorities in a Romanian socio-cultural context. It examines in detail the discourse of middle-class Romanian professionals taking up different ideological positions on the issue of the fairness of extremist politics towards ethnic minorities. A compa...

This article focuses on some of the issues that arise when examining social inequality and similar notions such as dominance or group superiority as participants' concerns. It emphasizes the importance of understanding constructions of inequality in terms of how they are (1) situated, constructed and invoked in talk; and (2) oriented to and part of...