Jonathan Potter
Encyclopedia
Jonathan Potter is Professor of Discourse Analysis
and, from February 2010, Head of the Department of Social Sciences, at Loughborough University
and one of the originators of discursive psychology
.
; his father was a school teacher and his mother was a batik artist. He went to School in Lewes
and then on to a degree in Psychology at the University of Liverpool
in 1974 where he was exposed to the radical politics of the city, became (briefly) interested in alternative therapies, and responded to the traditional British empirical psychology that was the mainstay of the Liverpool psychology degree programme at the time. He read the work of John Shotter, Kenneth Gergen and Rom Harré and became excited by the so called crisis in social psychology. This critical work led him to a Masters degree in Philosophy of Science at the University of Surrey
where he worked on speech act theory and had a first exposure to post structuralism and in particular the work of Roland Barthes. He read and wrote about Thomas Kuhn
, Paul Feyerabend
and Imre Lakatos
. At the same time philosophy of science provided a pathway to the new sociology of scientific knowledge
and in particular to the work of Harry Collins
, Michael Mulkay and Steve Woolgar
.
In 1979 he applied for a PhD funding at the University of Bath
to work with Harry Collins. He was offered a place but in the summer of 1979 the offer was withdrawn after the incoming Thatcher government cut the budget for social science. He started a part time PhD with Peter Stringer in Psychology at the University of Surrey while also working on a project on the experience of overseas tourists to Bath bed and breakfast hotels. In this period he met and started to live with Margaret Wetherell
who was doing a PhD with John Turner who, with Howard Giles
and Henri Tajfel
, was a key figure in British social psychology. He took part in the vibrant intellectual culture of social psychology in Bristol at the time although he was a lone voice against the broadly experimental focus of Bristol tradition of so-called European Social Psychology.
When Peter Stringer left Surrey to move to a Chair in the Netherlands Potter applied for DPhil funding again and started to work with Michael Mulkay at the University of York. He worked within the sociology of scientific knowledge tradition, focusing on recordings of psychologists debating with one another at conferences. Increasingly that work evolved into an analysis of scientific discourse.
When Margaret Wetherell was appointed to a post in St Andrews University in 1980 he moved to Scotland, doing his PhD long distance. In 1983 he gained his DPhil and started a temporary job whose primary duty was to teach statistics in the Psychological Laboratory (as the department was called at the time). Covering the statistics allowed him a lot of flexibility in other teaching and he developed a course simply called Discourse which covered speech act theory, implicature, semiotics, post-structuralism, critical linguistics and conversation analysis. The intensive engagement with this range of thinking influenced much of his later work.
After 4 years of temporary contracts at St Andrews he was offered a post at Loughborough University where he has taught ever since, first as lecturer, then Reader in Discourse Analysis from 1992, then Professor of Discourse Analysis from 1996, and Head of Department from February 2010. At Loughborough he worked with and was influenced by Derek Edwards, Michael Billig
, Charles Antaki and, more recently, Elizabeth Stokoe. Since 1996 he has lived with, and collabored with, Alexa Hepburn
. In the last decade he has taught workshops and short courses in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Venezuela, New Zealand, Australia, US and the UK.
In 2005 his book Cognition and Conversation (jointly edited with Hedwig te Molder) received the inaugural prize of the American Sociological Association Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis section in 2007. In 2008 he was elected to UK Academy of Social Sciences.
He is co-author, with Margaret Wetherell
of the influential book Discourse and Social Psychology which is one of the foundational texts that developed a discourse analytic approach to social psychology, a programme now refined into discursive psychology
. It offered new ways of conceptualizing fundamental social psychological notions such as attitudes
, categories, social representations
and rules. It has been cited more than three thousand times in more than a hundred different journals. One of its central achievements was to develop the analytic notion of 'interpretative repertoires' from Gilbert and Mulkay's work on scientific discourse and show how it could be more generally applied to social psychological topics. A joint grant led by Margaret Wetherell resulted in the volume Mapping the Language of Racism in 1992 that focused on the way racism is displayed and legitimated in conversations, newspaper articles and parliamentary debates.
At the start of the 1990s, in the book Discursive Psychology, he and Derek Edwards built a specific style of work that is now commonplace in journals across the social sciences as well as indirectly fostering a swathe of non-experimental approaches to social psychology. This took on core notions in cognitive psychology and in particular memory and attribution. Its aim was to show that existing cognitive conceptions of these notions failed to encompass the situated and flexible nature of actual language use and to consider how peoples' accounts of cognitive processes and events are themselves parts of actions. For example, they reanalysed Ulric Neisser
's classic work on the Watergate testimony showing the way John Dean's accounts of his excellent memory were used by counsel as parts of building the case against Nixon. It was distinctive from the earlier discourse analytic approach to social psychology in its use of records of natural interaction rather than open ended interviews and its focus on sequential interaction rather than on the identification of interpretative repertoires.
In 1996 he published the book Representing Reality. This was the fruition of a sustained engagement with the sociology of scientific knowledge and other approaches to factuality and provided an overview, extension and critique of social constructionism
in social sciences. It developed a discursive version of constructionism in contrast to the more familiar social constructionisms of thinkers such as Peter Berger
and Thomas Luckmann
.
His collection Conversation and Cognition, co-edited with Hedwig te Molder, brought together a group of conversation analysts, ethnothodologists and discursive psychologists (including Geoff Coulter, John Heritage, Anita Pomerantz, and Robert Hopper) to address fundamental issues at the boundary of work on cognition and interaction.
In 2007 he edited a three volume set of books that bring together a wide range of different studies in discursive psychology.
Their paper on problems and prospects in the use of qualitative interviews in psychology, published in Qualitative Research in Psychology, generated debate with Jonathan Smith
, Wendy Hollway and Elliot Mischler. It has been widely cited. This stimulated a further debate in Qualitative Research with Chris Griffin and Karen Henwood.
New work is focused on studying video records of mealtime interaction in families with young children. This has looked at actions such as directives, requests and threats and has a broader concern about the contribution of interaction analysis to the study of obesity.
Continuing controversy about the status of discursive psychology with respect to both traditional social psychology and alternative styles of critical work has a generated a further debate to be published in the British Journal of Social Psychology
in 2010.
Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....
and, from February 2010, Head of the Department of Social Sciences, at Loughborough University
Loughborough University
Loughborough University is a research based campus university located in the market town of Loughborough, Leicestershire, in the East Midlands of England...
and one of the originators of discursive psychology
Discursive psychology
For other uses of the word, see discursive.Discursive psychology is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes....
.
Life
Jonathan Potter was born in Ashford in Kent, and spent most of his childhood in the village of Laughton, East SussexLaughton, East Sussex
Laughton is a village and civil parish in the Wealden District of East Sussex, England. The village is located five miles east of Lewes, at a junction on the minor road to Hailsham . It appears in the Domesday Book, and there are Roman remains nearby.Education is provided at the Laughton Community...
; his father was a school teacher and his mother was a batik artist. He went to School in Lewes
Lewes
Lewes is the county town of East Sussex, England and historically of all of Sussex. It is a civil parish and is the centre of the Lewes local government district. The settlement has a history as a bridging point and as a market town, and today as a communications hub and tourist-oriented town...
and then on to a degree in Psychology at the University of Liverpool
University of Liverpool
The University of Liverpool is a teaching and research university in the city of Liverpool, England. It is a member of the Russell Group of large research-intensive universities and the N8 Group for research collaboration. Founded in 1881 , it is also one of the six original "red brick" civic...
in 1974 where he was exposed to the radical politics of the city, became (briefly) interested in alternative therapies, and responded to the traditional British empirical psychology that was the mainstay of the Liverpool psychology degree programme at the time. He read the work of John Shotter, Kenneth Gergen and Rom Harré and became excited by the so called crisis in social psychology. This critical work led him to a Masters degree in Philosophy of Science at the University of Surrey
University of Surrey
The University of Surrey is a university located within the county town of Guildford, Surrey in the South East of England. It received its charter on 9 September 1966, and was previously situated near Battersea Park in south-west London. The institution was known as Battersea College of Technology...
where he worked on speech act theory and had a first exposure to post structuralism and in particular the work of Roland Barthes. He read and wrote about Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.Kuhn...
, Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...
and Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...
. At the same time philosophy of science provided a pathway to the new sociology of scientific knowledge
Sociology of scientific knowledge
The sociology of scientific knowledge ' is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing "with the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity."...
and in particular to the work of Harry Collins
Harry Collins
Harry Collins is a British professor at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. While at the University of Bath Professor Collins developed the Bath School approach to the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge...
, Michael Mulkay and Steve Woolgar
Steve Woolgar
Stephen Woolgar is a British sociologist. He has worked closely with Bruno Latour, with whom he co-authored Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts ....
.
In 1979 he applied for a PhD funding at the University of Bath
University of Bath
The University of Bath is a campus university located in Bath, United Kingdom. It received its Royal Charter in 1966....
to work with Harry Collins. He was offered a place but in the summer of 1979 the offer was withdrawn after the incoming Thatcher government cut the budget for social science. He started a part time PhD with Peter Stringer in Psychology at the University of Surrey while also working on a project on the experience of overseas tourists to Bath bed and breakfast hotels. In this period he met and started to live with Margaret Wetherell
Margaret Wetherell
Margaret Wetherell is a prominent academic in the area of discourse analysis. Her 1987 book, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour, cowritten with Jonathan Potter, was very influential, particularly in social psychology, though also in other fields...
who was doing a PhD with John Turner who, with Howard Giles
Howard Giles
Howard Giles is a professor of psychology and linguistics at the Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the chair of the department from 1991 to 1998, and has been president of both the International Communication Association and the International Association...
and Henri Tajfel
Henri Tajfel
Henri Tajfel was a British social psychologist, best known for his pioneering work on the cognitive aspects of prejudice and social identity theory, as well as being one of the founders of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology.-Early life in Poland:Tajfel grew up in Poland...
, was a key figure in British social psychology. He took part in the vibrant intellectual culture of social psychology in Bristol at the time although he was a lone voice against the broadly experimental focus of Bristol tradition of so-called European Social Psychology.
When Peter Stringer left Surrey to move to a Chair in the Netherlands Potter applied for DPhil funding again and started to work with Michael Mulkay at the University of York. He worked within the sociology of scientific knowledge tradition, focusing on recordings of psychologists debating with one another at conferences. Increasingly that work evolved into an analysis of scientific discourse.
When Margaret Wetherell was appointed to a post in St Andrews University in 1980 he moved to Scotland, doing his PhD long distance. In 1983 he gained his DPhil and started a temporary job whose primary duty was to teach statistics in the Psychological Laboratory (as the department was called at the time). Covering the statistics allowed him a lot of flexibility in other teaching and he developed a course simply called Discourse which covered speech act theory, implicature, semiotics, post-structuralism, critical linguistics and conversation analysis. The intensive engagement with this range of thinking influenced much of his later work.
After 4 years of temporary contracts at St Andrews he was offered a post at Loughborough University where he has taught ever since, first as lecturer, then Reader in Discourse Analysis from 1992, then Professor of Discourse Analysis from 1996, and Head of Department from February 2010. At Loughborough he worked with and was influenced by Derek Edwards, Michael Billig
Michael Billig
Michael Billig is Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Working in contemporary social psychology, he trained in Bristol with Henri Tajfel as an experimental psychologist and helped design the so called minimal group experiments which were foundational to the social identity...
, Charles Antaki and, more recently, Elizabeth Stokoe. Since 1996 he has lived with, and collabored with, Alexa Hepburn
Alexa Hepburn
Alexa Hepburn is Reader in Conversation Analysis in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University.-Life:She was born in Leicester. Because her father was a telecoms engineer involved in modernising exchanges she moved between 12 different schools in the North of England and Scotland. ...
. In the last decade he has taught workshops and short courses in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Venezuela, New Zealand, Australia, US and the UK.
In 2005 his book Cognition and Conversation (jointly edited with Hedwig te Molder) received the inaugural prize of the American Sociological Association Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis section in 2007. In 2008 he was elected to UK Academy of Social Sciences.
Work
In 1984 he published Social Texts and Context: Literature and Social Psychology with Margaret Wetherell and Peter Stringer. This collaboration was devoped in parallel to Potter and Wetherell's PhD work.He is co-author, with Margaret Wetherell
Margaret Wetherell
Margaret Wetherell is a prominent academic in the area of discourse analysis. Her 1987 book, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour, cowritten with Jonathan Potter, was very influential, particularly in social psychology, though also in other fields...
of the influential book Discourse and Social Psychology which is one of the foundational texts that developed a discourse analytic approach to social psychology, a programme now refined into discursive psychology
Discursive psychology
For other uses of the word, see discursive.Discursive psychology is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes....
. It offered new ways of conceptualizing fundamental social psychological notions such as attitudes
Attitude (psychology)
An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for something. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event— this is often referred to as the attitude object...
, categories, social representations
Social representations
A social representation is a stock of values, ideas, beliefs, and practices that are shared among the members of groups and communities. Social Representations Theory is a body of theory within Social Psychology and Sociological social psychology...
and rules. It has been cited more than three thousand times in more than a hundred different journals. One of its central achievements was to develop the analytic notion of 'interpretative repertoires' from Gilbert and Mulkay's work on scientific discourse and show how it could be more generally applied to social psychological topics. A joint grant led by Margaret Wetherell resulted in the volume Mapping the Language of Racism in 1992 that focused on the way racism is displayed and legitimated in conversations, newspaper articles and parliamentary debates.
At the start of the 1990s, in the book Discursive Psychology, he and Derek Edwards built a specific style of work that is now commonplace in journals across the social sciences as well as indirectly fostering a swathe of non-experimental approaches to social psychology. This took on core notions in cognitive psychology and in particular memory and attribution. Its aim was to show that existing cognitive conceptions of these notions failed to encompass the situated and flexible nature of actual language use and to consider how peoples' accounts of cognitive processes and events are themselves parts of actions. For example, they reanalysed Ulric Neisser
Ulric Neisser
Ulric Neisser is an American psychologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a faculty member at Cornell University. In 1995, he headed an American Psychological Association task force that reviewed The Bell Curve and related controversies in the study of intelligence. The task...
's classic work on the Watergate testimony showing the way John Dean's accounts of his excellent memory were used by counsel as parts of building the case against Nixon. It was distinctive from the earlier discourse analytic approach to social psychology in its use of records of natural interaction rather than open ended interviews and its focus on sequential interaction rather than on the identification of interpretative repertoires.
In 1996 he published the book Representing Reality. This was the fruition of a sustained engagement with the sociology of scientific knowledge and other approaches to factuality and provided an overview, extension and critique of social constructionism
Social constructionism
Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena or objects of consciousness develop in social contexts. A social construction is a concept or practice that is the construct of a particular group...
in social sciences. It developed a discursive version of constructionism in contrast to the more familiar social constructionisms of thinkers such as Peter Berger
Peter L. Berger
Peter Ludwig Berger is an Austrian-born American sociologist well known for his work, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge .-Biography:...
and Thomas Luckmann
Thomas Luckmann
Thomas Luckmann is a German sociologist of Slovene origin. His main areas of research are the sociology of communication, Sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science.- Biography :...
.
His collection Conversation and Cognition, co-edited with Hedwig te Molder, brought together a group of conversation analysts, ethnothodologists and discursive psychologists (including Geoff Coulter, John Heritage, Anita Pomerantz, and Robert Hopper) to address fundamental issues at the boundary of work on cognition and interaction.
In 2007 he edited a three volume set of books that bring together a wide range of different studies in discursive psychology.
Recent work
Much of his recent work has been in collaboration with Alexa Hepburn. They developed a programme of study using material collected from the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's child protection helpline. This has combined a theoretical interest in how ideas 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 problems and prospects in the use of qualitative interviews in psychology, published in Qualitative Research in Psychology, generated debate with Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith (psychologist)
Jonathan Smith is a psychologist currently based at Birkbeck, University of London. He has been very prominent in promoting qualitative research within social psychology and health psychology...
, Wendy Hollway and Elliot Mischler. It has been widely cited. This stimulated a further debate in Qualitative Research with Chris Griffin and Karen Henwood.
New work is focused on studying video records of mealtime interaction in families with young children. This has looked at actions such as directives, requests and threats and has a broader concern about the contribution of interaction analysis to the study of obesity.
Continuing controversy about the status of discursive psychology with respect to both traditional social psychology and alternative styles of critical work has a generated a further debate to be published in the British Journal of Social Psychology
British Journal of Social Psychology
British Journal of Social Psychology is a journal published by the British Psychological Society . It publishes original papers on subjects like social cognition, attitudes, group processes, social influence, intergroup relations, self and identity, nonverbal communication, and social psychological...
in 2010.
External links
- A lecture that introduces discursive psychology in the context of critical discourse analysis is available here