Jonathan Potter
Jonathan Potter is Professor of Discourse Analysis at Loughborough University. After a BA in Psychology, an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in Sociology, he first taught statistics in the Psychological Laboratory at St Andrews University. Since 1988 he has worked in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough. He has studied scientific argumentation, descriptions of crowd disorder, current affairs television, racism, and relationship counselling. His book Discourse and social psychology (Sage, 1987, with Margaret Wetherell) laid the foundations for discourse analysis in social psychology and social science more broadly. It has had a huge impact, with more than 600 citations in over 150 different journals.His more recent books include: Mapping the language of racism (Columbia University Press, 1992, with Margaret Wetherell) which studied the way racial inequalities are discursively legitimated; and Discursive psychology (Sage, 1992, with Derek Edwards) that developed foundational principles for discursive psychology illustrated through a set of analyses of political controversies. In his most recent book (Representing reality, Sage, 1996) he attempts to provide a systematic overview, integration and critique of constructionist research in social psychology, postmodernism, rhetoric and ethnomethodology. He is currently co-editing a book on the (problematic) status of cognition in the explanation of human action, co-authoring a book on moderation and market research focus groups, and collaborating on a project considering research on calls to a national child abuse helpline. He is co-editor of the journal Theory and Psychology.
Key Words:
Discursive psychology, discourse analysis, conversation
analysis, constructionism, fact construction, helplines, science discourse,
racism, social psychology, opinions and evaluations, focus groups, cognition
and interaction
