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Conceptualising Social Class: Towards a Critical Social Psychological Approach (Maxine Woolhouse)

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Critical Social Psychology of Social Class

Abstract

This chapter provides a case for a critical social psychology of class. By way of doing so, it first traces some of the antecedents to critical social psychology through a discussion of the ‘crisis’ in psychology some several decades ago. We then provide an overview of the central arguments of Marxism, feminism and poststructuralist-informed discursive approaches (key influences on critical psychology) and present a selection of class-focussed research informed by these respective approaches. Finally, we point to what a critical social psychology of class might look like, drawing attention to the need for historical-discursive approaches to classification, the importance of intersectional analyses, and attention to the ‘everyday’ of class-making across a range of cultural sites.

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Correspondence to Katy Day .

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Day, K., Rickett, B., Woolhouse, M. (2020). Conceptualising Social Class: Towards a Critical Social Psychological Approach (Maxine Woolhouse). In: Critical Social Psychology of Social Class. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55965-6_3

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