176 Neill Korobov
quality. The analytic task of epistemic DP is that of epistemic
constructionism—that is, examining how, on what occasions, and in the
service of what kinds of interactional practices, discourse is identity
constitutive (Potter, 2010; Potter & Edwards, 2003; Edwards, 1997). A
discursive positioning orientation thus approaches identity by examining
how social interactions are ordered, made relevant, and attended to by
persons-in-conversations (Korobov & Bamberg, 2004a, 2004b, 2007;
Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2003). As noted earlier, this is a more markedly
bottom-up approach to examining identity construction within social
interactions as compared to the post-structural approaches to positioning
that tend to launder local identity work through extant social and cultural
ideologies/repertoires.
CONCLUSION
The aim of this chapter is to offer a critical psychological approach to
identity from a discursive psychological perspective. Although neo-
Eriksonian researchers have emphasized the importance of social contexts
and social interactions, empirical demonstrations of the rich and nuanced
links between personal identity development and social/interactional
contexts has either been investigated too broadly or not at all.
Psychologists have, unfortunately, contributed very little understanding to
the way identities emerge and develop within culturally rich interactional
spaces. Within psychology, the closest we typically get to an analysis of
identities vis-à-vis sociocultural contexts are studies modeled on a factors-
and-variables approach which emphasize extant ‘social contexts’ (schools,
peer groups, families, etc), and of the ways participation in these broad
contexts predicts various facets of cognitive internalizations of social
categories. Conspicuously absent are up-close interrogations of the
interplay between identities and the actual social interactions that comprise
and enliven broad social contexts. The charge of this chapter is for
critically minded psychologists to investigate how identities are formed,
contested, and revised within interactional contexts.