Freilich Lecture in Bigotry and Tolerance: Professor Martha Augoustinos on 'Re-examining the Prejudice Problematic'

Professor Martha Augoustinos, University of Adelaide

Re-examining the prejudice problematic

Despite increasing social and cultural diversity prejudice and racism continue to be intractable problems across the world. Psychology and more specifically, social psychology, has concerned itself with this social issue at least since the 1940s, generating a wide range of theoretical approaches to understand intergroup conflict in both everyday life and in institutional settings. This lecture reflects on a relatively recent and critical approach to understanding prejudice and racism – discursive psychology. Discursive psychology shifts the focus away from the cognitive and psychological domain of the individual to the shared language practices within a community that reproduce and legitimate racial and social inequalities. This body of work from Australia and other western liberal democracies has systematically examined both everyday talk and political discourse on issues pertaining to race, prejudice, immigration and intergroup relations more broadly. It identifies a recurring set of discursive resources and rhetorical commonplaces that are typically used in both informal and formal discourse to justify and legitimate the marginalised status of minority groups in ways that disavow a racist or prejudice identity. Paradoxically, these discursive resources are premised on the classic liberal tropes of freedom, individual rights, equality, and rationality. The implications of this discourse of ‘liberal-practical politics’, both for reproducing and challenging racism are discussed.

Martha Augoustinos is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Fay Gale Centre of Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide. Martha has published widely in the field of social psychology and discourse, in particular on the nature of racial discourse in Australia. This has involved mapping the trajectory of the 'race debate' in Australian public discourse since 1995 and has included an analysis of how Indigenous Australians are constructed in everyday conversation and political rhetoric. More recently this work has extended to analysing public discourse on asylum seekers and refugees. She is co-author of Social Cognition: An Integrated Introduction (3rd ed, Sage, 2014) with Iain Walker and Ngaire Donaghue and co-editor with Kate Reynolds of Understanding Prejudice, Racism and Social Conflict (Sage, 2001).