K Durrheim
Biographic Data
| ID | 31009 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Durrheim |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Durrheim |
| SIGNATURE | DURRHEIM K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2926-5953 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 98 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1144 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 98 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
How language divides: Asymmetries in the differentiating power of opinion discourse
Polarization is typically conceptualized as increasing distance between opposing attitudes. We argue instead that it unfolds through asymmetries in the group‐differentiating power of opinion language. In public discourse, actors use distinctive linguistic repertoires to signal alignment, mark boundaries, and render opinion landscapes intelligible. Conventional attitude scales estimate the distributions of private belief but cannot capture how the…
Whose Centre Holds? White Normativity in Race Dimensions Across Word Embeddings
Bias in word embeddings is often measured using bipolar dimensions, constructed as the difference between two anchor centroids. This technique assumes both poles are symmetrical and equally informative. However, normativity literature shows that one category may function as the unmarked norm, with others framed as marked deviations. In race, whiteness typically holds the normative position, and embedding-based race dimensions may inherit the skew…
Beyond groups: Meaning-making through Digital Connective Narratives
This article introduces Digital Connective Narratives (DCN) as a framework for explaining how large-scale meaning-making emerges in digital environments where group boundaries are fluid and participation is fragmented. Classic theories of groups, discourse communities, and collective narratives offer valuable insights into cohesion, identity, and shared cultural repertoires, but they presuppose forms of membership, continuity, and recognition tha…
Identification Environment, School Identification and School Burnout: Multilevel Models
Most research on well‐being in social psychology has focused on individuals. Based on the social identity approach to health, we examined how the average strength of social identification within a group—a measure of the ‘identification environment’—affects group members’ burnout symptoms and moderates the association between their social identification and burnout. We analysed these issues using two samples of lower‐secondary‐school‐age learners …
Alignment and Differentiation: How Language and Network Proximity Drive Opinion‐Based Group Formation Online
This study examines the interplay between language and social connectedness in forming opinion‐based groups on social media. Drawing on small‐world theory and social identity theory, we propose a dual‐layer approach that combines semantic and network analysis to investigate the dynamics of group formation on X/Twitter during the 2021 COVID‐19 vaccination campaign in South Africa. Our findings reveal a nuanced process of social sorting, where user…
Anchoring race: Improving the Construction of Race Dimensions in Word Embeddings
Word embeddings have become powerful tools for detecting social biases encoded in language, yet research on measuring race bias through embeddings remains underdeveloped compared to studies on gender bias. This gap largely stems from the complexity of constructing race dimensions, which involve socially contested meanings and less clear semantic oppositions. Existing studies on race bias often rely on intuition and context-specific approaches whe…
Handling racism in a radio phone-in programme: Telling it like it is
It is widely acknowledged that broadcast programmes are produced to serve the public’s interest. Presenting the programmes in a neutral and objective fashion, and engaging the audience in forming opinions, are common ways of achieving this. However, studies have suggested that there is a departure from these practices when the object of broadcast becomes societal problems such as racism. This case study examines how a presenter responds to a call…
Exploring double standards in ethnicity, migration and intercultural relations: An introduction to the Special Issue / Explorando los dobles estándares en materia de etnicidad, migración y relaciones …
This Special Issue examines the concept of ‘double standards’ in ethnicity, migration and intercultural relations, focusing on the uneven application of principles or expectations to similar groups or situations. Amid growing discussions on its relevance to intergroup conflicts and humanitarian crises on a global scale, the issue explores how double standards emerge in diverse socio-historical and political contexts, legitimizing unequal treatmen…
Crossing the line’: A boundary transgression model of resistance to desegregation
Informal patterns of spatial division often persist in historically divided societies where segregation has been officially dismantled. This paper presents a theoretical model to explain why, focusing on the desegregation–resegregation dynamic. The Boundary Transgression Model highlights two interconnected pathways - social psychological and human geographic - that shape intergroup relations under conditions of change, fostering the re-emergence …
Considering Discursive Absence as Resonance
Discourse contains both presences and absences, conveying meaning by what is said and what remains unsaid. Discursive absences make for challenging analysis because the unsaid is slippery by design. This paper looks at questions of rigour (How would you study absence?) and morality (Why would you study absence?) to make a case for qualitative studies of discursive absence. To conduct convincing studies of discursive absence, we propose a complime…
Human murmuration: Group polarisation as compression in interaction-language dynamics captured by large language models
New technologies enable a social psychology that sees individuals and society as co-constitutive elements of a complex system. Using the metaphor of a murmuration—a loosely organized, locally responsive flock—this paper proposes a “science of movement” focused on trajectories of individual activity within evolving social interactions and language. We illustrate human murmuration by reviewing research on group polarization, showing how conversatio…
Polarization on social media: Comparing the dynamics of interaction networks and language‐based opinion distributions
When people share information and converse on social media, they create “echo chambers” through preferential attachment to like‐minded people and opinions they already support. A great deal of research uses interactional ties between people—created by retweeting and following—to identify and study polarization in social networks. Some of this work then uses language analysis to characterize the opinions and concerns of subcommunities in the netwo…
Conversational Silencing of Racism in Psychological Science: Toward Decolonization in Practice
This article addresses a paradox between self-perceptions of psychology as a liberal, progressive, antiracist discipline and profession and the persistent criticisms of racism and calls for decolonization. It builds on the criticisms of epistemic exclusion and White centering, arguing that White supremacy is maintained by “conversational silencing” in which the focus on doing good psychology systematically draws attention away from the realities …
White settler ownership and dominance shape the consequences of autochthony beliefs on support for land reparations in South Africa
I hardly see the husband”: Noticing the absence of men in paid domestic labour research
Feminist scholars have focused on paid domestic labour as a site of gendered inequalities structured by race, gender, class, and citizenship. However, men are largely absent from feminist intersectional understandings of everyday interactions within paid domestic labour. This paper draws on an interview study of South African domestic workers focusing on their talk about interactions with male employers. The analysis demonstrates that talk about …
The psychology of social change – 30 years post-apartheid: What went wrong and how to fix it
This article presents some snapshots from 30 years of my collaborative work in the social psychology of social change in South Africa. Projects with students and colleagues used ethnographic, discursive, and survey methods to document racial encounters in the newly desegregated spaces of post-apartheid South Africa. I will review some of the successes and failures of desegregation efforts both in the country and in social psychology, where interg…
Simmering Hostilities, Group Identity, and Contested Autochthony Beliefs in Settler Societies
Simmering hostilities and their flashpoints of intergroup conflict are endemic features of unstable societies that are characterized by protracted intractable conflict. In this chapter, we examine the reasons why simmering hostilities become so entrenched. We argue that opinion-based groups employ autochthony narratives to frame a sense of entitlement and resistance when crucial moments of social change are being negotiated. We focus on the racia…
Speaker landscapes: Machine learning opens a window on the everyday language of opinion
We propose a new method that embeds speakers into a spatial representation according to the linguistic similarity of their contributions to a debate. Such "speaker landscapes" can be constructed quantitatively using word embeddings by annotating text corpora of speech samples by tokens representing the speakers. The way embeddings are constructed from predictive machine learning models means that speaker-tokens are placed closer together if they …
Ironies of proximity: Intergroup threat and contact avoidance on neighbourhood interface areas
Research on the dynamics of neighbourhood desegregation and diversity has identified a paradox. On the one hand, such processes may engender positive intergroup contact experiences, improving intergroup attitudes and relations. On the other hand, they may have the opposite effect, exacerbating negative intergroup relations and generating new forms of avoidance and exclusion. The present research explored one aspect of this paradox. Building on a …
The haunting quality of racism
Anti-racism has nurtured many visions of post-racism futures. All this talk and political action relies on and reproduces discourses of racism. While much of this discursive force lies in what is said, we argue that a haunting quality of racism may arise from what is unsaid. This includes the multifarious points of connection between the present and the past. We are all implicated, albeit unevenly. This article describes the phenomenon of spectra…
Cooperating with the outgroup rather than the ingroup: The effects of status, individual mobility, and group mobility on resource allocation and trust in an interactional game
We describe a team game that implements a social dilemma between ingroup cooperation and defection by self-enriching outgroup exchange. We test hypotheses derived from social identity theory about how group status and belief about individual mobility and group mobility affect exchange behavior. We ran 60 experimental team games between rich and poor groups under one of four experiment conditions in a fully crossed design, manipulating the presenc…
I don't feel insulted’: Constructions of prejudice and identity performance among Roma in Bulgaria
Drawing on studies showing that arguments about the nature of intergroup prejudice allow members of privileged groups to ‘perform’ a positive social identity, the present study explores how arguments about the nature of prejudice are produced by targets of prejudice in order to consolidate or challenge their own social identity. We conducted interviews with Bulgarian Roma and, based on a discursive psychology approach, analysed the way participan…
Maintaining the Status Quo through Repressed Silences: The Case of Paid Domestic Labour in Post-Apartheid South Africa
As competent social actors, we individually and collectively leave things unsaid that might threaten to disrupt the status quo. In this article, we outline an understanding of the unsaid and extend its implications to include what we call 'repressed silences' or silences about which we do not speak. Drawing on a diary-interview study involving five domestic labour dyads comprised of a white employer and a black worker, we examine silences topical…
Buttressing Whiteness by Confessing Guilt and Rejecting Racism: A Study of White-Talk about Paid Domestic Labour
This article makes a contribution to literature on “white-talk”. Existing literature shows how whiteness has been defended by criticizing black people, culture and government in subtle (and not so subtle) ways that allow speakers to deny racism. In contrast to denial, we focus on how white South Africans confess to feeling guilty for their privilege in comparison with their domestic workers. Confessions of guilt are ways of taking ownership of wh…
It’s not just “us” versus “them”: Moving beyond binary perspectives on intergroup processes
The social psychology of intergroup relations has emerged largely from studies of how one group of people (e.g., whites) think and feel about another (e.g., blacks). By reducing the social world to binary categories, this approach has provided an effective and efficient methodological framework. However, it has also obscured important features of social relations in historically divided societies. This paper highlights the importance of investiga…
Beyond the Optimal Contact Strategy: A Reality Check for the Contact Hypothesis
The contact hypothesis proposes that interaction between members of different groups reduces intergroup prejudice if--and only if--certain optimal conditions are present. For over 50 years, research using this framework has explored the boundary conditions for ideal contact and has guided interventions to promote desegregation. Although supporting the contact hypothesis in principle, the authors critique some research practices that have come to …
Displacing place-identity: A discursive approach to locating self and other
Questions of 'who we are' are often intimately related to questions of 'where we are', an idea captured in the environmental psychological concept of place-identity. The value of this concept is that it attends to the located nature of subjectivity, challenging the disembodied notions of identity preferred by social psychologists. The topic of place-identity would thus seem to be a productive point around which the sub-disciplines of social and e…
Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings
We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance ( p < .05), we found that 15 (54%) of …
The role of place and metaphor in racial exclusion: South Africa's beaches as sites of shifting racialization
This article examines the rhetoric of racial exclusion as applied to South Africa's beaches between 1982 and 1995, a period during which beach apartheid was progressively dismantled. Using a sample of 400 newspaper articles as textual evidence, we demonstrate how racist rhetoric during this period exploited ideological constructions of space and place. We focus on a set of arguments that constructed beaches as the legitimate preserve of the (whit…
A Paradox of Integration? Interracial Contact, Prejudice Reduction, and Perceptions of Racial Discrimination: A Paradox of Integration
A random digit dialing survey (N = 596) investigated the relationship between quantity and quality of interracial contact and Black South Africans’ perceptions of racial discrimination in postapartheid society. Results showed that harmonious contact was associated with lower levels of perceived collective discrimination, an effect that was mediated by racial attitudes and personal experiences of racial discrimination. The implications of the surv…
Different Kinds of Knowing: Generating Qualitative Data Through Mobile Interviewing
In this article, it is proposed that when an interviewer participates interactively in an interview creating a largely unrehearsed conversation, a different form of (intersubjective) knowledge can be produced. This kind of knowledge can be particularly useful in the research of elusive "social facts," such as subtle and ongoing discrimination, segregation, and prejudice. However, given the familiarity of socialized interviewer/interviewee positio…
The Principle‐Implementation Gap in Attitudes Towards Racial Equality (and How to Close It)
Research on attitudes towards racial equality has identified an apparent paradox, sometimes described as the “Principle‐Implementation Gap.” White Americans accept equality as an ideal yet reject interventions designed to achieve that ideal. In this article, we provide a critical review of empirical and theoretical work in the field and outline some directions for future research. Drawing on a program of research conducted in post‐apartheid South…
Foucauldian Feminism: The Implications of Governmentality
Challenging the Stubborn Core of Opposition to Equality: Racial Contact and Policy Attitudes
A Random Digit Dialing survey (n = 794) examined the interracial contact experiences and racial attitudes of White South Africans. The survey measured racial attitudes not only in terms of individuals' prejudice, but also in terms of their perceptions of group threat, perceived injustice, and support for various government policies designed to rectify the legacy of apartheid. The results indicated that the frequency and quality of interracial con…
The Struggle for the Nature of “Prejudice: Prejudice” Expression as Identity Performance
This article develops an identity performance model of prejudice that highlights the creative influence of prejudice expressions on norms and situations. Definitions of prejudice can promote social change or stability when they are used to achieve social identification, explanation, and mobilization. Tacit or explicit agreement about the nature of prejudice is accomplished collaboratively by persuading others to accept (1) an abstract definition …
Race Trouble: Race, Identity and Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa
This book draws on the South African experience to develop a theory of race trouble with the central observation that transformation in South Africa has reshaped patterns and practices of encounter and exchange between historically defined race groups. Race continues to feature prominently in these new forms of social interaction and, by participating in them, South Africans are cast once again as racial subjects - advantaged or disadvantaged, in…
Studying talk and embodied practices: Toward a psychology of materiality of ‘race relations’
This article argues that an adequate social psychology of racism needs to take seriously people's lived experiences of ‘race relations’. This involves an empirical focus on social life in ordinary contexts in which everyday practices are structured around ‘race’. In particular, we argue that such a social psychology of racism needs to understand the articulation of two related domains of practices—embodied spatio‐temporal practices and linguistic…
How racism discourse can mobilize right‐wing populism: The construction of identity and alliance in reactions to Ukip 's B rexit “ B reaking P oint” campaign
This article studies the interactional functions of racism discourse in mobilizing support for right‐wing populism. The analysis focuses on the controversy surrounding UKIP's “Breaking Point” poster campaign, which launched days before the historic British EU referendum. We focus on the development of “tripolar relations” between the UKIP party leadership, mainstream political elites, and ordinary citizens. Using thematic discourse analysis, we s…
Discourse and the Politics of Space in South Africa: The `Squatter Crisis
In this study, we analyze a body of discourse concerning the government of space in South Africa, employing the methodological framework developed by Wetherell and Potter (1992). Our data comprised a series of letters submitted to local newspapers by the white residents of a coastal town in the Cape Province. The letters protested, on various grounds, the development of a black `squatter' community within the town's environs. The present research…
Is poverty multidimensional? A comparison of income and asset based measures in five Southern African countries
Divide and Rule, Unite and Resist: Contact, Collective Action and Policy Attitudes among Historically Disadvantaged Groups
Racial segregation encourages members of historically advantaged groups to form negative intergroup attitudes, which then motivate practices of discrimination that sustain inequality and disadvantage. By implication, interventions designed to increase intergroup contact have been proposed as a means of reducing dominant group prejudices and promoting social change. In this article, we highlight another mechanism through which segregation shapes i…
The anatomy of 'race trouble' in online interactions
South Africa has a long history of race-related conflicts in a variety of settings, but the use of the concept 'racism' to analyse such conflicts is characterized by theoretical and \nmethodological difficulties. In this article, we apply the alternative 'race trouble' \nframework developed by Durrheim, Mtose, and Brown (2011) to the examination of \nracialized conflicts in online newspaper forums. We analyse the conflicts using an \napproach inf…
Xenophobic Violence and Struggle Discourse in South Africa
This paper argues that xenophobia in South Africa is entangled in discourses of liberation struggle, which are often used to justify anti-foreigner violence. We first examine some existing academic explanations for xenophobia, namely internalised racism, poverty/inequality, nationalism, and township and informal settlement politics. To avoid deterministically explaining xenophobia as 'caused' by any of these factors, however, we introduce a conce…
Explaining the paradoxical effects of intergroup contact: Paternalistic relations and system justification in domestic labour in South Africa
Beyond Prejudice: Extending the Social Psychology of Conflict, Inequality and Social Change
The concept of prejudice has profoundly influenced how we have investigated, explained and tried to change intergroup relations of discrimination and inequality. But what has this concept contributed to our knowledge of relations between groups and what has it obscured or misrepresented? How has it expanded or narrowed the horizons of psychological inquiry? How effective or ineffective has it been in guiding our attempts to transform social relat…
Predicting support for racial transformation policies: Intergroup threat, racial prejudice, sense of group entitlement and strength of identification
Policies and programs designed to challenge the effects of racial discrimination (such as affirmative action) are hotly contested. Factors which have been proposed to explain opposition to these policies include racial prejudice, group threat and self-interest, and perceptions of intergroup justice. We report the results of two random national telephone surveys which tested a theoretically based model of the predictors of policy support in post-a…
Power through Knowledge: Ignorance and the ‘Real Man’
The aim of this article is to show that tensions between conflicting accounts of masculinity need not only be ‘resolved’ by individual men, but can have a collective ‘resolution’. We argue that the ‘real man’ - by drawing together the ‘macho’ and ‘new man’ discourses - represents one such ‘integrated’ discourse of masculinity available to men. Our argument is based on a discourse analysis of 15 editions of Men’s Health, a South African magazine p…
The Denial of Racism: The Role of Humor, Personal Experience, and Self-Censorship
Informed by discursive psychology, this study aimed to identify and explicate those rhetorical maneuvers that function to introduce the issue of race into conversations in the presence of an interracial couple (the first two authors) in the "new South Africa" and to negotiate "race talk" in their presence while distancing the speaker from inferences of racism. Over a period of 2 months, conversations of people with whom the first two authors came…
Technologies of social control: Crowd Management in Liberal Democracy
Crowd protest activity within liberal democratic countries of the West brings into view a series of tensions within the liberal democratic mode of rule. Crowds must be controlled, but at the same time the state should not limit the right of communities to protest. In this paper we argue that these tensions may be resolved by adopting a form of rule which seeks to manage crowds throguh authority internal to the crowd, by means of strategies aimed …
Racial Contact and Change in South Africa: Racial Contact and Change in South Africa
We investigate the effects of sociopolitical change on intergroup contact and social distance attitudes in South Africa, and the effect of these variables on intergroup attitudes and racial policy attitudes. The data come from secondary analysis of surveys conducted between 1991 and 2005, as well as a dedicated survey conducted in 2006. The results reveal widespread racial isolation among Black people; ambivalent attitudes to racial integration a…
Lying as a Factor in Research on Sexuality
This study investigated whether lying was a factor in research on sexuality among 1902 black South African first-year students. Consenting students completed structured questionnaires comprising 3 subject areas of biographical/career, sexuality, and political violence, each followed by an attitude scale. Subjects were more comfortable and truthful while completing the biographical/career and sociopolitical violence scales than the sexuality scale
Discourse and the Politics of Space in South Africa: The `Squatter Crisis
In this study, we analyze a body of discourse concerning the government of space in South Africa, employing the methodological framework developed by Wetherell and Potter (1992). Our data comprised a series of letters submitted to local newspapers by the white residents of a coastal town in the Cape Province. The letters protested, on various grounds, the development of a black `squatter' community within the town's environs. The present research…
Religiosity, Aids, and Sexuality Knowledge, Attitudes, Beliefs, and Practices of Black South-African First-Year University Students
This study investigated the association of religiosity with sexuality and AIDS knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and practices of 1,817 black first-year students in South Africa. On a structured questionnaire, consenting students rated themselves on scales of religiosity, attitudes toward homosexuality, intrafamilial communication about contraception, AIDS attitudes, and AIDS knowledge. Negative attitudes toward homosexuality were significantly asso…
Conceptions of legitimacy as a variable mediating the relationship between relative deprivation and militancy
The role of relative deprivation and authoritarianism in predicting militancy and the potential for political protest form the backdrop of this study. The influence of conceptions of regime legitimacy as a variable mediating this relationship was investigated by means of a factorial design, employing a white student sample ( N = 135). Conceptions of legitimacy were manipulated by dividing the sample into left- and right-wing subsamples. The left-…
Cognition and Ideology: A Rhetorical Approach to Critical Theory
Extracts of an argument which defended the assassination of the popular South African leader, Chris Hani, are used to show variability in the style of fascist cognition. Such variability, although compatible with current dialogical models of thinking, contradicts the theoretical predictions of the classical social psychological theory of the authoritarian personality. Furthermore, it undermines this traditional attempt to develop a psychological …
Race and Relevance: A Content Analysis of the South African Journal of Psychology
All 478 papers which were published in the South African Journal of Psychology between 1970 and 1995 were content analysed to determine changing ways in which race issues have been dealt with in the Journal. 1 It is argued that the discipline of psychology may have played a role in perpetuating racism under the apartheid regime by inaction, by not speaking out. To capture this distinction between ‘speaking out’ and ‘not speaking out’ we distingui…
Social Constructionism, Discourse, and Psychology
This paper serves as an introduction to social constructionist approaches to psychology. It outlines the arguments which have prompted a shift away from empiricism in the social sciences. Harré's (1992) distinction between behaviourism and the first and second cognitive revolution is used to provide a broad historical framework to develop contrasts between mainstream empiricist psychology and constructionist approaches. The central claim is that …
Theoretical Conundrum: The Politics and Science of Theorizing Authoritarian Cognition
The historical development of the four main theories which have attempted to explain the relationship between cognitive style and ideological content—i.e., authoritarianism, extremism theory, context theory, and value pluralism theory—is analyzed from a rhetorical perspective. The discussion focuses on the manner in which the tensions between theoretical universalism and political critique have been “resolved” by theorists working in different hi…
Whose Humdrum? A Rejoinder to Meloen
Employment Opportunities for Psychology Graduates in South Africa: A Contemporary Analysis
The practice of psychology in South Africa currently depends on a high level of qualification and is reserved within professional registration. Apart from the fact that this professionalisation does not produce the human resources necessary to meet the social needs of the country, it is also excluding the potential enlistment of a very large number of graduates in psychology in social practice domains. In order to make an analysis of the current …
The relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and attitudinal conservatism: A multidimensional analysis
The predictions of four social psychological theories of the relationship between cognitive style and conservatism—the theory of the authoritarian personality, extremism theory, context theory, and value pluralism theory—are examined in two empirical studies. Unlike previous research, these studies employ a measure of ambiguity tolerance, the Attitudinal Ambiguity Tolerance scale, which can assess cross-content variability in cognitive style. The…
Professional Psychology: Where are We Headed
There is much debate at present around changing the professional structure of psychology to better meet the needs of South African society. In this paper this debate is assessed in terms of the requirements of the employment sector. Employment advertisements, for psychology and social and human science graduates appearing in three national weekly newspapers over 21 years, from 1976 to 1996, were analyzed. From the data it appears that the role of…
Technologies of social control: Crowd Management in Liberal Democracy
Crowd protest activity within liberal democratic countries of the West brings into view a series of tensions within the liberal democratic mode of rule. Crowds must be controlled, but at the same time the state should not limit the right of communities to protest. In this paper we argue that these tensions may be resolved by adopting a form of rule which seeks to manage crowds throguh authority internal to the crowd, by means of strategies aimed …
The social practice of psychology and the social sciences in a liberal democratic society: An analysis of employment trends
This paper explores the relevance of psychology and the social and human sciences in a changing South Africa. The new South Africa embraces a liberal democratic approach to government. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) is a policy document that articulates the goals of this liberal democratic society and the transformative approach to be followed to achieve it. The RDP policy document advocates massive social change and the steps…
Theories of culture in racist discourse☆
The Contributions of Political Life Events to Psychological Distress Among South African
The psychological consequences of adverse political experiences among South African youth were studied in a sample of 540 black and white adolescents from two age groups, evenly divided by gender. Three questionnaires were administered, measuring exposure to political life events, the presence of symptoms of psychopathology, and stressful personal life events during the previous 5 years. The first hypothesis, predicting a substantial contribution…
Displacing place-identity: A discursive approach to locating self and other
Questions of 'who we are' are often intimately related to questions of 'where we are', an idea captured in the environmental psychological concept of place-identity. The value of this concept is that it attends to the located nature of subjectivity, challenging the disembodied notions of identity preferred by social psychologists. The topic of place-identity would thus seem to be a productive point around which the sub-disciplines of social and e…
Power through Knowledge: Ignorance and the ‘Real Man’
The aim of this article is to show that tensions between conflicting accounts of masculinity need not only be ‘resolved’ by individual men, but can have a collective ‘resolution’. We argue that the ‘real man’ - by drawing together the ‘macho’ and ‘new man’ discourses - represents one such ‘integrated’ discourse of masculinity available to men. Our argument is based on a discourse analysis of 15 editions of Men’s Health, a South African magazine p…
A Defence of an ‘Immanentist’ Account of Social Form and Experience
In defence of South African discursive social psychology, this paper provides a brief account of social form and experience as immanent in discursive practices. Social order and social Institutions must be viewed as no more and no less than the sedimentation of coordinated human practices, and that any attempt to explain the ‘objectivity’ of the human made social world by recourse to biological or cultural essences is to entirely misunderstand it…
The Denial of Racism: The Role of Humor, Personal Experience, and Self-Censorship
Informed by discursive psychology, this study aimed to identify and explicate those rhetorical maneuvers that function to introduce the issue of race into conversations in the presence of an interracial couple (the first two authors) in the "new South Africa" and to negotiate "race talk" in their presence while distancing the speaker from inferences of racism. Over a period of 2 months, conversations of people with whom the first two authors came…
The role of place and metaphor in racial exclusion: South Africa's beaches as sites of shifting racialization
This article examines the rhetoric of racial exclusion as applied to South Africa's beaches between 1982 and 1995, a period during which beach apartheid was progressively dismantled. Using a sample of 400 newspaper articles as textual evidence, we demonstrate how racist rhetoric during this period exploited ideological constructions of space and place. We focus on a set of arguments that constructed beaches as the legitimate preserve of the (whit…
The Effectiveness of the Vignette Methodology: A Comparison of Written and Video Vignettes in Eliciting Responses about Date Rape
Most research addressing issues of victimization, such as date rape, has made use of written vignettes. In this study we investigated whether the same patterns of blame attribution are given for written and video vignettes. Three videos depicting hypothetical heterosexual date rape incidents were made. Each one was based on one of three variables that have been shown to have relevance to evaluations of date rape: “owing”, “leading on” and “alcoho…
Foucauldian Feminism: The Implications of Governmentality
Racializing teenage pregnancy: Culture' and 'tradition' in the South African scientific literature
The signifiers, 'race', 'culture' or 'ethnicity' are utilized in the teenage pregnancy literature (1) to highlight 'differences' in adolescent sexual and reproductive behaviour and (2) as explanatory tools. When 'white' teenagers are the focus of research, psychological explanations are usually invoked, whereas for 'black' teenagers, explanations are socio-cultural in nature. In this article, we explore how, through a process of racialization, th…
Contact and the ecology of racial division: Some varieties of informal segregation
The analysis of contact between groups must proceed from an uncomfortable realization. Notwithstanding its formal abolition in many societies, segregation remains pervasive as an informal mechanism for ordering and defining social relations. Social psychologists' tendency to investigate contact under ‘optimal’ conditions may obscure this fact. This article discusses an observational study that attempted to chart some varieties of informal segrega…
Psychology (67 works) · Sociology (64 works) · Political science (57 works) · Social Psychology (56 works) · Gender Studies (41 works) · Law (37 works) · Politics (35 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (30 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Social Psychology (24 works)