Humanizing racialization: Social psychology in a time of unexpected transformational conjunctions

Crafting the unsayable: Making meaning out of racialised maternal health-care encounters

There are persistent and profound racialised inequalities in maternal and reproductive health in the UK. Yet in multiple settings, these disparities have been blamed on class or ethnicity, individuals and communities rather than the structures within which they live. In this study, we draw on narratives told within a 'slow-stitch' craft workshop, organised in southern England for racialised women with reproductive trauma, to show how processes of racialisation and racism shape experiences of maternal and reproductive healthcare. Experiences of reproductive trauma were multiple and cumulative. The burden of knowledge of racialised disparities was carried into health-care spaces, with plans made in advance to self-manage in risky spaces. The constant management of racialised stereotypes and subsequent strategies of bodily and emotional containment ultimately was not protective and there was little agency over levels of care received in health-care spaces. Perceptions surrounding racialised bodies shaped treatment, whilst proximities to whiteness afforded alternative realities. Taking a phenomenological approach we analyse race as a sensory, spatial and relational constellation haunted by long-standing histories of fraught inequality. Bringing together in the crafting circle a group of women racialised in different ways enabled the sharing of "unspeakable" stories surrounding racism and reproductive trauma, and allowed race to be brought into being as a form of solidarity and connection.

'Guilty as charged': Intersectionality and accountability in lay talk on discrimination and violence

Although intersectionality is gaining ground in social psychological research, most approaches fail to capture the historically and interactionally contingent nature of intersecting identities and the implications of their mobilization. This study, aiming at addressing this lacuna, focuses on the intersection of identities as lay actors' resource, used to account for the murder of Zak Kostopoulos, a young LGBTQI+ activist in Greece. Data are derived from 4 focus group discussions in which 25 young people, aged between 19 and 25 years old, participated. Using concepts provided by discursive/rhetorical psychology, analysis indicated that the rhetorical occasioning of intersecting identities is oriented to social accountability concerns and accomplishes important positioning work for the speakers. Specifically, by underscoring the intersecting (sexual/class) identities of the victim, speakers accentuated the moral charge against the perpetrators, distancing themselves from the (constructed as prototypically Greek) image of the un-enlightened and servile bigot. However, although participants explained ZK's murder through recourse to his intersecting identities, they grounded claims for justice on a common human identity (independent of class and sexuality). Findings are discussed in relation to the need to advance a critical agenda for social psychology research on intersectionality and to processes of ideological reproduction in the context of LGBTQΙ+ politics.

Precarious engagements and the politics of knowledge production: Listening to calls for reorienting hegemonic social psychology

In this paper, we invite psychologists to reflect on and recognize how knowledge is produced in the field of social psychology. Engaging with the work of decolonial, liberation and critical psychology scholars, we provide a six-point lens on precarity that facilitates a deeper understanding of knowledge production in hegemonic social psychology and academia at large. We conceptualize knowledge (re)production in psychology as five interdependent 'cogs' within the neoliberal machinery of academia, which cannot be viewed in isolation; (1) its epistemological foundations rooted in coloniality, (2) the methods and standards it uses to understand human thoughts, feelings and behaviours, (3) the documentation of its knowledge, (4) the dissemination of its knowledge and (5) the universalization of psychological theories. With this paper we also claim our space in academia as early career researchers of colour who inhabit the margins of hegemonic social psychology. We join scholars around the world in calling for a much-needed disciplinary shift that centres solutions to the many forms of violence that are inflicted upon marginalized members of the global majority. To conclude, we offer four political-personal intentions for the reorientation for the discipline of hegemonic social psychology with the aim to disrupt the politics of knowledge production and eradicate precarity.

Reproductive governance and the affective economy

The governance of reproductive practices, processes, decision-making, experiences, desires, subjectivities, and bodies has received and continues to receive significant attention in feminist efforts to name and resist reproductive oppression. And over the last 30 years, articles published in Feminism & Psychology have made significant contributions to the visibilisation and critique of this form of oppression. In this Virtual Special Issue on Reproductive Governance and the Affective Economy, we apply repronormativity and affect to our reading of 20 articles published in Feminism & Psychology. Collectively, these articles provide a glimpse of the wide-ranging scope of reproductive regulation (including that which is re-produced by/within feminism itself), and the various work that repronormativity and affect do in this governance. The challenging of reproductive governance notwithstanding, we conclude by arguing that the centring and circulation of certain reproductive subjects and their experiences within feminist knowledge production is itself a part of and upholds repronormativity and forecloses the possibility of reproductive freedom for all.