168 Neill Korobov
psychological claims about identity development, rarely is identity studied
as it is embodied within those contexts or interactions. Rarely do we see
how identities are built, shaped, contested, and revised within actual social
contexts. Instead, contexts and interactions (and all other nods to the
‘external’ cultural world) are usually treated as a kind of overlay or
influencing factor and are thus methodologically reduced to factors and
variables. The social and cultural realm, as fluid and nuanced interactional
sites where identities develop, have thus had an impoverished status in
psychological identity research for over 50 years (see Meeus, 2011).
A CRITICAL DISCURSIVE APPROACH TO IDENTITY
The purpose of this chapter is to advance a critical (and specifically
discursive) psychological perspective (hereafter, DP) where identity is
underpinned, made possible, and reflective of the institutional and material
frameworks of one’s social location and interactions. Specifically, this
chapter advances a discursive psychological approach that is
constructionist, but also ethnomethodologically-oriented (Antaki &
Widdicombe, 1998; Drew & Heritage, 1992; Edwards, 1997; Edwards &
Potter, 1992; Korobov, 2010, 2013, 2014; Potter, 1996; Widdicombe,
1998). DP is an approach that is concerned with the action orientation of
how identity categories are handled in use. DP promotes a performative
view of identity that shows how actual interactional moments where
categorical identity ascriptions are built as discursive actions that are
rhetorically meaningful as part of the machinery of some bit of social and
cultural business being conducted. Here, identities are discursive practices,
constituted in and through discourse (Butler, 1990; Korobov, 2010, 2013,
2014; Widdicombe, 1998).
Although an ethno-inspired DP approach to identity is aligned
(broadly) with critical psychology, it does resist the common move in
critical psychology of reading the accomplishment of people’s identity
through socio-political concepts and the ascription of identities to people
based on their social/cultural location (e.g., the ‘identity politics’