Discursive Psychology and Embodiment: Beyond Subject-Object Binaries

For over thirty years, discursive psychology has offered a robust challenge to cognitivist approaches to psychology, demonstrating the relevance of discursive practices for understanding psychological topics and social interaction. Matters of embodiment – the visceral, sensory, physical aspects of psychology – have, however, so far received much less attention. 

This book is the first text to address the theoretical and analytical challenges raised by bodies in interaction for discursive psychology. The book brings together international experts, each of which tackles a different topic area and interactional setting to examine embodiment as a social object. The authors consider the issue of subject-object relations and how ‘inner’ psychological subject-side states are constructed and enacted in relation to object-side states through embodied discursive practices. How do bodily processes become particular kinds of embodiment through and within social interaction? How are bodies psychologised as social objects? 

Moving beyond dualisms of the subject/object that construct an ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ psychological state, the book pushes forward contemporary theory and analysis within discursive psychology. Discursive Psychology and Embodiment is therefore an essential resource for researchers across the social sciences working within discourse, social interaction, and the ‘turn to the body’.

Sally Wiggins is Associate Professor in Psychology at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research interests focus on eating practices in everyday social interaction, and she has previously authored a textbook entitled Discursive Psychology, and has published numerous empirical articles and book chapters on discursive psychology.

Karin Osvaldsson Cromdal is Associate Professor in Social Work at Linköping University, Sweden. She has published on identities and social interaction in primarily institutional settings such as detention homes for troubled youth, helpline and emergency rescue service interaction, and social work counselling.