Membership categorization analysis, race, and racism

ABSTRACT

Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) has the potential to highlight the dynamic ways that people make race relevant to everyday life. However, existing MCA research conducts analyses that are disconnected from the broader sociopolitical contexts within which race categories are developed and used. This article proposes an extension MCA that foregrounds ways that racial category use mobilizes racial inferences and is consequential for the constitution of knowledge about race and racism. Scholars conducting an MCA of race categories should (a) engage with social science research on race and racism (b) meet unique adequacy requirements for research. We apply these extensions to three key tenets of MCA: knowledge, the membership categorization device, and morality. We then present two illustrative analyses: from Asian Americans discussing business in the United States and from Indians discussing anti-Black racism in India. We close by discussing the implications of our framework for MCA and qualitative psychological research.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American
• discursive psychology
• India
• membership categorization analysis
• race
• racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials.

Notes

¹ By ‘European’, we refer to the empires and other agencies arising from Europe that proceed to colonize various parts of the world, including parts of Europe itself. While not all European powers had an active role in colonialism, scholars argue that Europeans benefited immensely from this (see for the case of Scandinavian countries).

² For a full analysis see Shrikant (2018b)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natasha Shrikant

Dr. Natasha Shrikant is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She uses ethnography and discourse analysis to explore the relational, institutional, and political ramifications of identity-negotiation in interaction. Her published research addresses (a) how Asian American communities use racial and ethnic categories in institutional interactions and (b) how meanings of “racism” are constituted and contested in public discourse. She has published in Communication, Discourse Studies, and Social Psychology journals.

Rahul Sambaraju

Dr Rahul Sambaraju is a Lecturer in Qualitative Social Psychology at The University of Edinburgh, UK. His work is concerned with how social categories and identities and implicated in social inequities. He uses discursive methods to examine issues of race and racism, migration and refuge-seeking, and nationalism. He has published widely in areas of social psychology, discursive psychology, and race studies. Recently, he edited a Special Issue in the British Journal of Social Psychology on ‘Visible race and invisible racism’.