2001 Meanings of psychology as politics PP.pdf

Political Psychology, 2001

Political Psychology, 2012

Political Psychology 36(3), 2015

Political Psychology has experienced a marked increase in the number of submissions, downloads, citations, and global exposure over the past few years. It is also a more influential journal than it was at the beginning of the decade. Specifically, the journal is now available in more than 4,200 libraries worldwide, compared with 2,200 five years ago; the number of downloads has recently increased to more than 620,000(!), compared with about 100,000 five years ago; the number of new submissions has increased drastically over the past five years to more than 300 per year; and the impact factor has risen to 1.771-the highest in the history of the journal. In 2014 alone, more than 40 articles published in the journal have been downloaded more than 500 times each. In this article, we analyze submissions to Political Psychology, acceptances, downloads, and citations by area of study and methodology.

We contribute to a greater understanding of political psychology by 1) collecting data in a more systematic way for the intellectual community, 2) sensitizing students to the extent to which any intellectual discipline is socially constructed and is a work in progress, 3) heightening awareness of the political aspects of intellectual life, 4) exposing readers to the wide variety of diverse approaches and methodologies utilized by political psychologists, and 5) suggesting the range of topics that political psychology can address successfully and the range of techniques it can utilize.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science

This article presents a discussion inspired by the invitation formed by Kevin Carriere’s book: “Psychology in Policy – Redefining Politics Through The Individual”. From a theoretical standpoint in culture psychology Carriere challenges the idea of politics as a particular practice carried out by mainly politicians. Instead, he attempts to anchor processes of politics in the everyday lives of individuals, directed at changing their worlds. In this article, we discuss how this ambition could evolve even further by relating it to other theoretical approaches working with similar ambitions.

The Journal of Politics

Terry Nardin's The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott is a generally sound and lucid exposition of the major Oakeshottian corpus. It is organized around the Oakeshottian themes that philosophy has little relevance for practical existence (including politics); that the activity of "theorizing" is capable of achieving conclusions solely for the sake of understanding; and that this achievement cannot be further reduced to any sort of practical or moral or psychological level of meaning: "It is his achievements as a philosopher committed to disengaging theorizing from practical concerns that will, I believe, ultimately distinguish Oakeshott from the political theorists of his time" (12). In other words, Nardin wants Oakeshott taken seriously as a philosopher, not as a "political theorist." Along the way of an exposition thematically organized around subjects such as "understanding," "doing," and "historical understanding," Nardin (in what for this reviewer was the most illuminating and useful aspect of the book) compares and contrasts Oakeshott with such twentieth-century thinkers as Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Habermas, Gadamer, Rorty, Foucault, and the scientist, Arthur Eddington; and such nineteenth-century thinkers as Nietzsche, Mill, Dilthey, Droysen, and Windelband. Another of the book's virtues, especially for readers less familiar with the Oakeshottian corpus, is the lucid exposition of "human conduct" and "theorizing contingency," which links them to the earlier accounts of the modalities of practice and history, respectively. Nardin places Oakeshott in the hermeneutic tradition interpreting a world of meanings as its given, but goes on to show how Oakeshott's view of theorizing human conduct sets him off in different ways from now one and now another of the previously mentioned thinkers and also from mainstream social science. It is the informed contrast with these other thinkers that has the effect of putting Oakeshott's often elusive and apparently idiosyncratic themes in their intellectual context, and of distinguishing Nardin's book from being merely a competent and lucid summary of most of Oakeshott's major themes, thematically construed around the irrelevance of philosophical understanding for practical understanding. The introduction distinguishes Oakeshott's themes from various existentialist, pragmatist, and post-modernist views, while also showing where

2013

This book provides an introduction to political psychology through a focus on European politics and topics. It describes a style of doing political psychology in Europe that has developed out of dialogue with as well as critique of North American approaches. By emphasising the theoretical and methodological diversity of political psychology, the book is intended to contribute to a greater understanding of the strength and utility of the field. • Opens up and extends the study of political psychology to a variety of socio-political contexts and manifestations of political behaviour • Clearly outlines the usefulness and promises of distinctive critical approaches in social and political psychology • Explicitly considers the role of language, communication, identity and social representations in the construction of political meanings. Political Psychology will appeal to upper-level students and scholars who seek to extend their knowledge of the complex relationship between psychology, politics and society.

2020

It may be time to think about the co-dependent relationship between psychology and politics in a fresh way. The literature on the relationship between psychology and politics is very extensive, almost overwhelmingly so. Authors coming from the domains of politics and social psychology dominate the ranks of writers in this field, but others more attuned to fields as diverse as neuropsychology, gender studies, history and geography also add their wisdom. Understanding how we can find ourselves in such turmoil, change, and confusion in the twenty-first century, especially in mature democracies, seems important to moving on in the right direction now, but we feel that this understanding is missing. Many of us feel anxious, overwhelmed and a little afraid of what we see in the current political discourse; many of us see citizens' ideas and behavior shaking up the current political environment. Does this political environment influence us, too, over time? Over time do we partially create this political environment? This last question can be extremely important in the study of politics and psychology. The editors of this book, like many other citizens at this historical moment, wanted to understand the forces and outcomes in this current political moment. Even more than understanding, we wanted to help ourselves stay grounded during the rapid changes and heated emotions of our times. Talking with others convinced us that we were not alone in attempting to understand and deal with the rapid-fire political change and drama of our times. It also became clearer that this was not the only time in human history characterized by this degree of political upheaval and the need to somehow process it and move beyond it. What might be our individual roles in creating this political upheaval?

Theory & Psychology, 2015

This paper responds to a set of problems in contemporary psychology that cluster around the notion that the discipline might be “applied” to the real world, and that such application would thereby serve as the methodological and conceptual grounding for “political psychology.” The specific problems addressed comprise “interpretation” of material in the quantitative and qualitative traditions, the notion of “application” as such which rests on the prior modelling of individual and collective psychological phenomena, the conceptions of “politics” that operate in disciplinary interventions, the idealisation of “community” in different traditions of community psychology in the US and Europe, and finally “psychology” itself as the background against which these other problems are elaborated. In response to these problems the paper describes political theoretical concepts from feminist interventions in Left practice and brings them to bear on the discipline of psychology, turning the dire...