SC&I’s Dean Jonathan Potter will deliver a keynote address at the Social Psychology Section Annual Conference 2017.

The conference will be held from Aug. 31, 2017 to Sept. 1, 2017 in Leicester, U.K. A pre-conference, titled “Making a Difference: Impact for Impact” will be held on Aug. 30, 2017.

Potter’s keynote lecture is titled “Shaming ­– Using Contemporary Discursive Psychology to Capture a Practice.”

According to Potter, “This talk will start with some observations about the different national and international traditions of contemporary social psychology, with emphasis on the place of discursive psychology. It then will pick up from Potter (2010, 2012, Potter & Shaw, in press) to highlight the virtues of working with detailed records of naturalistic data which, in contrast to some traditional methodological injunctions (Manstead, 2008), allow for a rigorous study of contingently unfolding practices. It will then build on a series of studies of requests, directives and threats in a corpus of family mealtimes to consider the interactional production of shame in the context of admonishments (Craven & Potter, 2010; Hepburn & Potter, 2011).

“Unlike directives, admonishments are not focused on immediate behavior modification. Admonishments, like requests, orient to the agency of the recipient; however, in admonishments it is orienting to the recipient as actively doing wrong. The talk will focus on the exploitation of interrogative grammar to interactionally deliver shaming. Constructions such as ‘what are you doing’ and ‘what did I say’ place the recipient in the position where they are treated as able to understand and formulate their own wrongdoing; although that option is not necessarily the one recipients will opt for. In epistemic terms the question is one where both speaker and recipient are treated as K+ with respect to the answer, and the business of shaming is precisely dependent on the recipient’s publically shown K+ position. The talk will end by considering how this topic could provide insights into broader questions about the nature of morality and children’s social development.”

The conference website describes the event as “. . . an excellent opportunity to showcase and demonstrate the originality, rigour and impact of contemporary social psychological research and learn from leading professionals both from the UK and overseas.

“Contributions include papers, symposia and posters as well as more innovative dissemination methods such as ‘5 minute challenge’ sessions covering all areas of social psychology presented by academics, practitioners and students.”