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Analyses of racist discourse have often involved data from contexts concerning issues of human mobility. A great deal of this literature points to the extent to which people draw on the tropes of liberalism to justify social exclusion, and in particular to warrant negative evaluations of outgroups. Using media data from political debates involving the radical right-wing U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) in the U.K. General Election campaign of 2015, the present article highlights a different rhetorical strategy by which exclusion can be warranted by speakers arguing for a reduction in immigration. This novel strategy explicitly avoids any negative characterization of outgroups, and instead advocates the individualization of immigration decisions. This is exemplified in UKIP's policy of basing the United Kingdom's approach to immigration on an "Australian-style points-based system." This was invoked by UKIP representatives in the debates as a straightforward "off-the-shelf" system that would enable the U.K. to "take back control" of immigration, while ensuring that immigration decisions were based on individual merit rather than on group membership. As such, the points system could also be invoked specifically to anticipate and counter accusations of racism and/or xenophobia. The findings are discussed in relation to the tacit ideological assumptions underpinning UKIP's policy, specifically around psychologization, the reliance on an acultural version of Australia, and the tacit use of categorical accounting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper outlines a perspective on Milgram's obedience experiments informed by rhetorical psychology. This perspective is demonstrated through a qualitative analysis of audio recordings and transcripts from two of Milgram's experimental conditions: 'voice-feedback' and 'women as subjects'. Analysis draws attention to the way in which participants could draw the experimenter into a process of negotiation over the continuation of the experimental session, something which could lead to quite radical departures from the standardized experimental procedure, and points to the ineffectiveness of Milgram's fourth prod (You have no other choice, you must go on). These observations are discussed in terms of their implications for theory and research on dis/obedience, with a specific focus on the concepts of choice and agency and the nature and meaning of dis/obedience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The present paper argues for a discourse analytic approach to social psychological peace research and demonstrates the potential of such an approach through a re-specification of the concept of attitudes to war. This is illustrated through an analysis of a series of televised debates broadcast in the UK in February-March 2003 in the build-up to the formal outbreak of the Iraq War. Analysis draws attention to the importance of rhetorical context and function, the inseparability of attitude object and evaluation and the formulation of evaluations as specific or general. Findings are discussed in the context of recent calls for methodological pluralism in social psychological peace research with a suggestion that matters of epistemology stand prior to methodology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the concept of ideological dilemmas in order to explore how a sample of young people constructed potentially contrary themes of liberal citizenship in discussions of un/employment. The study took place in the context of recent policy developments in the UK which have sought to place a renewed emphasis upon notions of responsible citizenship in relation to both welfare and education policy. A total of 58 participants were interviewed in 24 semi-structured group interviews. In response to direct questions on un/employment, participants could resolve dilemmas concerning welfare rights and the responsibility to contribute to society by emphasizing a criterion of effortfulness, thereby adopting a primarily individualistic explanation of unemployment. In other contexts however, this could be replaced by an emphasis on social explanations of unemployment. In particular, participants could treat immigration as a cause of unemployment. These findings are interpreted in terms of people's capacity to construct rhetorical strategies based upon different ideological themes in particular contexts. They are discussed in relation to previous research on social policy discourse and recent debates regarding the appropriateness of seeking to identify ideological themes in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the time of the devolution settlement in the UK, there was widespread concern that the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales would prompt a rise in English identity at the expense of British identity and, in turn, threaten polyethnic constructions of citizenship. Such presumptions typically rested on reified understandings of the category labels British and English, and conflated the construct of national identity with the constructs of territorial belonging, social inclusion and citizenship. Post-devolution survey data do not currently reveal a decline in British identity in England. Measures of attachment to Englishness vary as a function of ethnic origin of respondent, hut also as a function of question wording. A qualitative interview study of young adult Pakistani-origin Muslims in Greater Manchester, north-west England, illustrates how Englishness may be understood to pertain variously to an exclusive cultural or racial category, or to an inclusive territorial entity or community of political interest. Ethnic constructions of English identity need not imply exclusive understandings of citizenship, but their meaning depends crucially on the ways in which nationality and identity are in turn understood in relation to matters of polity and civil society. Conversely, inclusive understandings of national identity do not guarantee the existence of effective ethnic integration or substantive ethnic equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists frequently use the iconic figure of the soldier who fights and dies for the nation to exemplify the power of processes of national identification. However, little work has considered how soldiers themselves orient to the possibility of being motivated by a desire to `serve the country'. The present study explored this through a series of interviews with members of the British Army and Territorial Army. Although in explicit talk about `the country' the soldiers typically downplayed the importance of `serving the country' as motivation, in discussing the prospect of a European army the national basis of armies was taken for granted. The findings are discussed in terms of the problematic nature of displays of English `patriotism' or `pride'. It is argued that the relationship between national identity and military service, often assumed to be straight- forward in social scientific texts, is oriented to as a delicate issue by soldiers themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the concept of social citizenship, which was first theorized in the late 1940s alongside the creation of the UK welfare state and concerns citizens' rights to a basic income and standard of living. It suggests that social citizenship—particularly welfare provision—is a useful and important topic for social psychological research, albeit one that has been largely overlooked. We provide an overview of key developments in social citizenship and consider the impact of 30‐plus years of neoliberal governance in Western democracies, which has resulted in ongoing changes to how welfare rights and responsibilities are configured, such as policies that make social citizenship rights contingent on conduct. We outline social scientific work that examines these shifting ideas of citizenship, personhood, welfare, and conditionality and make the case for a critical discursive psychological approach, which we illustrate with a brief empirical example. We suggest that critical discursive social psychology is particularly well‐placed to examine how psychological assumptions are built into both policy and lay discourse and how these can legitimate interventions designed to work on the conduct of the unemployed, such as therapeutic and behavior change initiatives. Finally, we argue that psychology is faced with a choice; while there are opportunities for the discipline to contribute to the design and implementation of such initiatives, to do so requires accepting the basic values of the underpinning neoliberal agenda. Instead, it is vital to place these assumptions under the critical microscope and explore how they work to obscure structural disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientific work on the suppression, mitigation or denial of prejudiced attitudes has tended to focus on the strategic self-presentation and self-monitoring undertaken by individual social actors on their own behalf. In this paper, we argue that existing perspectives might usefully be extended to incorporate three additional considerations. First, that social actors may, on some occasions, act to defend not only themselves, but also others from charges of prejudice. Second, that over the course of any social encounter, interactants may take joint responsibility for policing conversation and for correcting and suppressing the articulation of prejudiced talk. Third, that a focus on the dialogic character of conversation affords an appreciation of the ways in which the status of any particular utterance, action or event as 'racist' or 'prejudiced' may constitute a social accomplishment. Finally, we note the logical corollary of these observations - that in everyday life, the occurrence of 'racist discourse' is likely to represent a collaborative accomplishment, the responsibility for which is shared jointly between the person of the speaker and those other co-present individuals who occasion, reinforce or simply fail to suppress it.