Robles2026d
| Robles2026d | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Robles2026d |
| Author(s) | Jessica S. Robles, Natasha Shrikant, Cristian Tileagă |
| Title | A discursive psychological approach to moral dilemmas in discrimination and racism in everyday life |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Membership categorization analysis, Conversation analysis, Discursive psychology |
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| Year | 2026 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Qualitative Psychology |
| Volume | 13 |
| Number | 2 |
| Pages | 392–404 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1037/qup0000365 |
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Abstract
Racism continues to be a social problem in the context of far-right populism and some permissiveness against sharing views that would otherwise have been highly sanctioned. Qualitative research has demonstrated the important role that language, social organization, and interaction play in how racism is reproduced, accounted for, and resisted in various settings of everyday life. Discursive psychology in particular is an approach that has engaged nearly from its inception with racism, setting an ongoing agenda with regard to a critical examination of the language of racism. In this article, we draw on discursive psychology alongside membership categorization analysis and insights from conversation analysis to examine how racist talk is designedly defeasible in the current political climate in which racism is simultaneously emboldened by far-right successes but still constrained against overt racist claims. Our analysis presents two examples of public interactions where political figures are asked to address race and racism in institutional settings—such as confirmation hearings and news interviews—in the United States and the United Kingdom. We show how participants accused of being too sensitive to racism resist this positioning and how those accused of racist talk evade accountability. Using discursive psychology and compatible approaches reveals in detail the important moral dilemmas at the heart of how people deal with racism in everyday institutional interactions.
Notes
