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Jonathan Potter | |
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 Potter in 2009 | |
| Born | 8 June 1956 |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Surrey |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Loughborough University |
| Main interests | Discursive psychology |
| Website | Rutgers University |
Jonathan Potter (born 8 June 1956) [1] is a British psychologist and Dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. [2] He is one of the pioneers of discursive psychology.
Jonathan Potter was born in Ashford,Kent,and spent most of his childhood in Laughton,East Sussex. His father was a school teacher,and his mother was a batik artist. He attended school in Lewes and pursued a degree in Psychology at the University of Liverpool in 1974. During his studies,he became interested in alternative therapies and the emerging critical perspectives in social psychology,influenced by the work of John Shotter,Kenneth Gergen,and Rom Harré.
Potter then completed a master's degree in the philosophy of science at the University of Surrey,where he studied speech act theory and post-structuralism,particularly the work of Roland Barthes. His interest in the philosophy of science led him to the new sociology of scientific knowledge,engaging with the work of Harry Collins,Michael Mulkay,and Steve Woolgar.
In 1979,Potter applied for PhD funding at the University of Bath to work with Harry Collins,but the offer was withdrawn due to budget cuts. He began a part-time PhD at the University of Surrey,studying the experiences of overseas tourists in Bath. During this period,he met and started living with Margaret Wetherell,a prominent figure in British social psychology.
Potter later transferred to the University of York,working with Michael Mulkay on the sociology of scientific knowledge,focusing on scientific discourse analysis. He completed his DPhil in 1983.
Potter joined the University of St Andrews,where he taught statistics and developed a course on discourse,covering various theories and methods that influenced his later work. After four years of temporary contracts,he moved to Loughborough University in 1988. He progressed from lecturer to Professor of Discourse Analysis and eventually became Head of Department in 2010. At Loughborough,he collaborated with colleagues such as Derek Edwards,Michael Billig,Charles Antaki,and Elizabeth Stokoe.
Since 1996,Potter has lived with and collaborated with Alexa Hepburn. He has conducted workshops and short courses internationally. In 2005,his book Cognition and Conversation (co-edited with Hedwig te Molder) received the inaugural prize of the American Sociological Association's Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis section. In 2008,he was elected to the UK Academy of Social Sciences.
In 1984,Jonathan Potter published Social Texts and Context:Literature and Social Psychology with Margaret Wetherell and Peter Stringer. This collaboration developed alongside Potter and Wetherell's PhD research.
Potter co-authored the influential book Discourse and Social Psychology with Margaret Wetherell,which is a foundational text in the development of a discourse analytic approach to social psychology,now known as discursive psychology. The book introduced new ways to conceptualize fundamental social psychological concepts such as attitudes,categories,social representations,and rules. It has been cited over three thousand times in more than a hundred different journals. One of its key contributions was the development of the analytic notion of 'interpretative repertoires,' adapted from Gilbert and Mulkay's work on scientific discourse,and its application to social psychological topics. A joint grant led by Margaret Wetherell resulted in the 1992 volume Mapping the Language of Racism,which examined how racism is expressed and legitimized in conversations,newspaper articles,and parliamentary debates.
In the early 1990s,Potter and Derek Edwards authored Discursive Psychology,establishing a specific style of work now prevalent in social science journals. This approach challenged core notions in cognitive psychology,particularly memory and attribution,by demonstrating that cognitive processes and events are embedded in and part of language use. For example,they reanalyzed Ulric Neisser's work on the Watergate testimony,showing how John Dean's accounts of his memory were used by counsel in building the case against Richard Nixon. This work differed from earlier discourse analytic approaches by using records of natural interaction rather than open-ended interviews and focusing on sequential interaction instead of identifying interpretative repertoires.
In 1996,Potter published Representing Reality,which built on his engagement with the sociology of scientific knowledge and other approaches to factuality. The book provided an overview,extension,and critique of social constructionism in the social sciences,developing a discursive version of constructionism in contrast to the more familiar social constructionism of thinkers such as Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann.
Potter co-edited Conversation and Cognition with Hedwig te Molder,a collection that brought together conversation analysts,ethnomethodologists,and discursive psychologists,including Geoff Coulter,John Heritage,Anita Pomerantz,and Robert Hopper,to address fundamental issues at the intersection of cognition and interaction.
In 2007,Potter edited a three-volume set of books that compiled a wide range of studies in discursive psychology.
Much of Jonathan Potter's recent work has been in collaboration with Alexa Hepburn. They have developed a research program using material collected from the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's child protection helpline. This research combines a theoretical interest in how concepts such as emotion and joint understanding are conceptualized in social psychological research with a focus on applied topics,such as advice resistance and its management.
Their paper on the problems and prospects of using qualitative interviews in psychology,published in Qualitative Research in Psychology,sparked a debate with Jonathan Smith,Wendy Hollway,and Elliot Mishler,and has been widely cited. This discourse stimulated further discussion in Qualitative Research with Chris Griffin and Karen Henwood.
Potter and Hepburn's new research focuses on studying video records of mealtime interactions in families with young children. This work examines actions such as directives,requests,and threats,with a broader concern about how interaction analysis can contribute to the study of obesity.
In a 2010 paper in the British Journal of Social Psychology, [3] Potter summarized and continued the debate over the status of discursive psychology concerning both traditional social psychology and alternative styles of critical work.
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our world experience. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics. In these expressions, ' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context.
Social constructionism is a term used in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory. The term can serve somewhat different functions in each field; however, the foundation of this theoretical framework suggests various facets of social reality—such as concepts, beliefs, norms, and values—are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members, rather than empirical observation of physical reality. The theory of social constructionism posits that much of what individuals perceive as 'reality' is actually the outcome of a dynamic process of construction influenced by social conventions and structures.
Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that empirically investigates the mechanisms by which humans achieve mutual understanding. It focuses on both verbal and non-verbal conduct, especially in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with a focus on casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors' offices, courts, law enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media, and focus on multimodal and nonverbal activity in interaction, including gaze, body movement and gesture. As a consequence, the term conversation analysis has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of interactions. CA and ethnomethodology are sometimes considered one field and referred to as EMCA.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) uncovers the hidden meanings embedded in texts and conversations. It analyses the way the language used reinforces power relationships, social hierarchies, and ideologies.
Discursive psychology (DP) is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes in talk, text, and images.
Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, spoken, or sign language, including any significant semiotic event.
Norman Fairclough is an emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as applied to sociolinguistics. CDA is concerned with how power is exercised through language. CDA studies discourse; in CDA this includes texts, talk, video and practices.
Teun Adrianus van Dijk is a scholar in the fields of text linguistics, discourse analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
Ian Parker is a British psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is Emeritus Professor of Management in the School of Business at the University of Leicester.
Susan Tufts Fiske is an American psychologist who serves as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations, Social Cognition, and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University. Her theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, power as control theory, and the continuum model of impression formation.
Margaret Wetherell is a prominent academic in the area of discourse analysis.
Interactional linguistics (IL) is an interdisciplinary approach to grammar and interaction in the field of linguistics, that applies the methods of Conversation Analysis to the study of linguistic structures, including syntax, phonetics, morphology, and so on. Interactional linguistics is based on the principle that linguistic structures and uses are formed through interaction and it aims at understanding how languages are shaped through interaction. The approach focuses on temporality, activity implication and embodiment in interaction. Interactional linguistics asks research questions such as "How are linguistic patterns shaped by interaction?" and "How do linguistic patterns themselves shape interaction?".
Michael Joseph Mulkay is a retired British sociologist of science.
Alexa Hepburn is professor of communication at Rutgers University, and honorary professor in conversation analysis in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University.
Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.
Feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA) is a method of discourse analysis based on Chris Weedon's theories of feminist post-structuralism, and developed as a method of analysis by Judith Baxter in 2003. FPDA is based on a combination of feminism and post-structuralism. While it is still evolving as a methodology, FPDA has been used by a range of international scholars of gender and language to analyse texts such as: classroom discourse, teenage girls' conversation, and media representations of gender. FPDA is an approach to analysing the discourse of spoken interaction principally.
Elizabeth Stokoe is a British social scientist and conversation analyst. Since January 2023, she has been Professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at The London School of Economics and Political Science. She was previously Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University (2002-2022) in the Discourse and Rhetoric Group, where she remains an Honorary Professor. She has been Professor II at University of South-Eastern Norway since 2016.
Mediated stylistics or media stylistics is a new and still emerging approach to the analysis of media texts. It aims to take seriously two ideas: first, that media texts involve 'the construction of stories by other means'; and second, that in an age marked by digital connectivity, media texts are inherently interactive phenomena. To meet this twofold aim, mediated stylistics has brought together the analytic toolkits of discursive psychology—which is finely attuned to the contextual specificities of interaction—and stylistics—which is finely attuned to the grammatical/rhetorical/narratorial specificities of texts as texts. Recent research in which mediated stylistics has been put to work, for instance, has shown how mediated representation of issues like sexism, sexualisation, alleged rape and violence against women can differ, and differ in rhetorically consequential ways, from the original un-mediated source material.
Susan "Sue" Speer C.Psychol, FHEA is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.
Charles Goodwin was a UCLA distinguished research professor of communication and key member of UCLA’s Center for Language, Interaction and Culture. Goodwin contributed ground-breaking theory and research on social interaction and opened new pathways for research on eye gaze, storytelling, turn-taking and action.
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