Language and psychosocial oppression: Methodological approaches, challenges, and opportunities

ABSTRACT

In this editorial, we introduce the special issue entitled, ‘Language and psychosocial oppression: Methodological approaches, challenges, and opportunities’. This special issue includes seven articles that were produced in relation to the growing attention being given to the psychological phenomena associated with (in)justice and (in)equity, with a particular focus on how justice-oriented agendas and interventions might be advanced. Specifically, the included articles point to ways in which more micro-oriented approaches to studying languaging practices might serve to analytically and theoretically foreground justice-oriented research aims.

KEYWORDS:

• disability
• discursive psychology
• ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
• race and racism
• social justice

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ While we chose to use the term ‘micro’ here, we recognize that defining language-based methodologies and methods as being either ‘micro’ or ‘macro’ (Van Dijk 2003), may be limiting, oversimplifying, and ultimately serve to flatten possibilities for how analysts conceptualize the study of languaging practices. Nonetheless, we find the ‘micro-macro’ label to be a useful albeit imperfect heuristic to highlight the varying analytic foci across the approaches commonly used to study languaging practices.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Williamson

Francesca A. Williamson, PhD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Learning Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and qualitative methodologist whose work engages the fields of Black Studies, education, ethnomethodology, and health equity and justice research. Dr. Williamson leads the HEiRS Lab, a multidisciplinary collaborative that interrogates how real-world educational, healthcare, and research practices reproduce and subvert (de)humanizing social orders. She is currently co-editing a volume entitled Classical Writings and Contemporary Responses in Qualitative Inquiry with Sage Publications.

Jessica Nina Lester

Jessica Nina Lester, PhD (she/her) is a Professor of Qualitative Methodology in the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is a qualitative methodologist and interdisciplinary researcher who publishes in areas related to qualitative method/ology, with a particular focus on discourse and conversation analysis methods, digital tools/spaces in qualitative research, and disability in critical qualitative inquiry. In much of her substantive research, she has sought to examine and illustrate how every day and institutional language use makes visible what and who becomes positioned as normal and abnormal in relation to the oft taken-for-granted normality-abnormality binary. Most recently, she co-authored the book, Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World (Sage, 2022).