Discursive Psychology

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

This book provides an introduction to political psychology through a focus on European politics and topics. It describes a style of doing political psychology in Europe that has developed out of dialogue with as well as critique of North American approaches. By emphasising the theoretical and methodological diversity of political psychology, the book is intended to contribute to a greater understanding of the strength and utility of the field. • Opens up and extends the study of political psychology to a variety of socio-political contexts and manifestations of political behaviour • Clearly outlines the usefulness and promises of distinctive critical approaches in social and political psychology • Explicitly considers the role of language, communication, identity and social representations in the construction of political meanings. Political Psychology will appeal to upper-level students and scholars who seek to extend their knowledge of the complex relationship between psychology, politics and society.

This chapter explores ways in which discursive psychology sheds light on how language justifies, conceals and works to produce the dominance of men in intimate relationships. We demonstrate two ways language can be deployed to achieve these effects. First, the close examination of discourses about violence can reveal much about the way violence against women is justified, minimized and ignored. Second, attention to rhetorical devices deployed in these discourses, such as metaphor, ambiguity and marking strategies, can help in understanding how they are anchored and reinforced in everyday conversations. These forms of discursive enquiry, and other possibilities, open up ways of better understanding the dynamics of men’s violence against women and opportunities for intervention to produce more equitable practices.

This paper analyses the process of exclusion of Saddam Hussein, in a Spanish newspaper, El País, in the period just before the Gulf War. This exclusion procedure is articulated on two axes: division and rejection (Foucault, 1964). `Division' means establishing an inclusive us and an exclusive them, in this case, him. This move therefore entails a personification of the conflict, which produces immediate feelings of identification or rejection, and simplifies how the war is understood. Both effects are reinforced by the second move of the exclusion procedure: `rejection'. Once the two camps are established an imaginary dimension, related to the ideology of consensus and ethnic prejudices, is evoked in order to create an image of Saddam Hussein in which he plays the stranger, the irrational being, the madman, the beast and, ultimately, the personification of evil. These are the villain's attributes in the fairy tale of the just war (Lakoff, 1992), which is the script of the event activated by the newspaper for the conceptualization of the conflict and its protagonists. On the other hand, a positive image is created for a unique and ideological us, in which, as readers, we are included and absorbed.

Ao consideramos o discurso cotidiano ou especializado uma forma de comunicação consciente e ordenada segundo a lógica linguística, precisamos considerar suas motivações e interesses, geralmente, submersos aos códigos de linguagem, embora ajam fortemente na constituição da mensagem discursiva. A "comunicação inconsciente" transportada pelo discurso pode informar muitas vezes mais do que a mensagem denotada das palavras.

Qualitative methodologies offer various approaches to interpreting qualitative data. Here, we consider how different approaches to interpreting the same data can be useful in learning about the scope and utility of qualitative methods, as well as exploring the role of reflexivity in analytic decision-making and interpretation. We apply both thematic and discourse analysis to university students’ responses to an open-ended question about ‘women who smoke while pregnant’. We show how our interpretations differ when analytic attention is paid to the content (thematic analysis) versus the rhetorical function (discourse analysis) of participants’ responses. We also show how reflexivity, compatible with our discursive analysis, allowed us to identify the local discursive context in which the data were produced and therefore how participants oriented to this context. We use our learning experience as a way of showcasing the value of dynamic and reflexive approaches to qualitative data.

Media pressure is often implicated in changes to foreign policy. It is at once hailed as a check on the abuse of power and then reviled for undermining the roles and responsibilities of democratic institutions. But we are still left to wonder what media pressure is. This question is explicitly answered here, and in doing so it shows how the never-ending conversation between the media and executive creates social imperatives to which the executives "must" respond or else threaten their needed moral positions required to lead or act in international affairs.

Review

"Derek Miller offers an original and compelling argument for greater intellectual cross-fertilization among political communication theorists, on the one hand, and international affairs scholars, particularly those working in the constructionist approach, on the other.  Not afraid to offer impressively original and unorthodox ideas, Miller takes the reader on an erudite review of great European political philosophers and how they can contribute to a modern understanding of media and political pressure.  He has written a thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating book."

--Steven Livingston, Professor, School of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University

"This fascinating book opens up quite new directions in the study of key political processes. Focusing on the alleged influence that the media are supposed to exercise on the political process, Derek Miller brings two novel sets of considerations to bear. Turning to the history of discussions of media influence he brings to light the profundity of discussions of this very issue in the period during which the Western democratic tradition was being forged. Perhaps more importantly he asks the fundamental question: how could the media influence the political process? To answer this question he makes use of one of the most recent developments in social psychology, positioning theory. This is an original and powerful study, and deserves to be very widely read."

--Rom Harré, Psychology Department, Georgetown University, Washington DC and Linacre College, Oxford

Intimate partner violence is increasingly recognised as occurring not only between heterosexual partners but also in same-sex relationships. Heterogendered relationship norms have been identified as intersecting with other social inequalities to create and sustain power differentials between partners -and fuel violence -yet remain largely unexplored in relation to women's same-sex relationships. Building on existing feminist research we explore the use of gendered scripts in South African lesbian and bisexual women's accounts of relationship norms and practices. We apply a feminist poststructuralist lens to focus-group discussion data to investigate how such scripts are drawn on to either uphold or challenge violent and coercive relationship practices. The findings illustrate the salience of heterogendered norms and demonstrate how violent practices become possible in contexts of deepening socioeconomic impoverishment -such as in post-apartheid South Africa -where race, space, gender and sexuality are tied to attempts at reclaiming respectable personhood. Efforts to dismantle inequitable gendered power relations and attendant violent practices require both macro-interventions aimed at shifting structural constraints on lesbian and bisexual women's agency, as well as micro-processes aimed at scripting equal power relations between partners as desirable.

In this paper, we focus on the question of the nature of place and how orderliness arises in places. The development of the psychology of place is briefly reviewed emphasizing the contribution of a phenomenological perspective. This review allows us to identify a central problem in the development of ideas of place in environmental psychology, namely the problem of sociality. The sociality problem is that current conceptualizations of place do not explain how places become known and understood intersubjectively. Current conceptualizations emphasize individual understanding without explaining how places can become known collectively. We propose a resolution to this problem by drawing upon a strand of phenomenology which has not usually been foregrounded in psychology-the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz. Schutz's programme for social science and in particular how he addressed the problem of intersubjective understanding is outlined. Schutz's perspective emphasizes the 'We-relationship' and its mutual co-construction through interaction and in particular language use; places as 'typifications' form an integral part of this co-construction. Drawing on work undertaken in discursive psychology, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology we then illustrate how this programme could be implemented in environmental psychology with a particular focus on how collective understandings of place can arise and how the genesis of this collective understanding can be empirically studied. r

This paper investigates the verbal construction of emotions in a bilingual/bicultural setting, the target languages and cultures being American English and Cypriot Greek. To examine whether bilingual speakers express different emotions in their respective languages, a study was carried out with 10 bilingual/bicultural professionals. A scenario was presented to them first in English and a month later in Greek and their verbal reactions were recorded. The participants' responses were then analysed through three questions: (1) whether they translate from one language to the other; (2) whether and when codeswitching occurs; (3) whether there is a pattern in the use of emotion words. The analysis of the results shows that respondents displayed different reactions to the same story depending on the language it was read to them in. The paper argues that participants changed their social code, i.e. sociocultural expectations, with the change in linguistic code. These findings raise interesting questions about the relationship between language, emotions and cognition, and the formation of the bilingual self.

Child rearing is a universal task, yet there are differing solutions according to the dynamics of socio-cultural milieu in which children are raised. Cultural models of what is considered good or bad parenting become explicit in every day routine practices. Focusing on early mother-infant interactions in this article we examine the discursive practices and strategies that foster cultural values such as autonomy and relatedness. Drawing on micro-analysis of videotaped mother-infant interactions from middle class families in Muenster, Germany and farming Nso families in Kikaikelaki, Cameroon, we aim at illustrating how diverse discursive strategies construct alternative versions of the child’s experience of self and self-in-relation-to-others. In each case, mothers draw on discursive practices that convey cultural norms and values that fit the relevant cultural context.

The article introduces discourse analysis as a fruitful approach to psychotherapy change-process research. Extracts are presented from a successfully resolved, client-specified, problematic theme that was selected from a successful 8-session psychodynamic-interpersonal therapy of a female client presenting with a major depressive episode. The study offers a heuristic demonstrating (a) how resolution of the client's problem evolved from implications raised by the client's own description of her predicament and involved the therapist's legitimation of a morally defensible account of the client's actions and (b) how cultural meanings can be brought into the consulting room as intimately personal problems. The implications of studying therapeutic change as a discursive activity comprising the use and negotiation of sociocultural meanings are discussed.

(From the back cover) Looking for a practical, comprehensive overview of qualitative research methods? Want to know the best approach to take for you and your research project?

Analysing Qualitative Data in Psychology takes you through five different qualitative approaches - thematic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, grounded theory, narrative analysis and discourse analysis. Applying them all to a common data set, this book gives you step-by-step guidance on each approach and helps you work out which is the right one for you.

Plus, with a whole new part on qualitative data collection - including chapters on interviewing, social media data and visual methodologies - and an extensive set of online resources, this new edition is the ultimate resource for students engaged in qualitative psychological research or studying methods at any level.

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/analysing-qualitative-data-in-psychology/book268665

In February 2007, Kirsten Dierolf had the opportunity to visit Prof. Rom Harré at Georgetown University to sit in on some of his classes and produce an interview. Mark McKergow and Kirsten Dierolf had been interested in discursive psychology and the Wittgensteinian connection for a while -this interview was the first live contact which led to many interesting developments like Wittgenstein scholar Danièle Moyal-Sharrock's and Rom Harré's visits to SOL conferences and a more informed understanding about where SF fits in the overall landscape of philosophy. Rom Harré and Fathali M. Moghaddam have just published a new textbook, Psychology for the Third Millennium (Sage Publications 2012, reviewed elsewhere in this issue) in which many of the ideas in this interview are delineated in much more detail: a fascinating and very relevant read.

Discursive psychology (DP) offers a window onto the way emotion and cognition play out in everyday interaction. As one of the pioneers of DP, Edwards has been instrumental in shaping this approach, and his work on emotion and interaction has been particularly inspiring. In this chapter we consider this impact by providing an understanding of the concerns that motivated Edwards, the contributions of the paper and the lasting impact that his research has had on how emotion is conceptualized. Edwards developed a discursive psychology of emotion that examined two things: the ways in which emotion categories can be threaded through everyday talk, and how people use ascriptions and avowals of emotion to perform actions in talk. This focus on how wonderfully useful emotion categories and descriptions can be for speakers had never been done, and still sits in stark contrast to classic individualist studies that characterize the discipline of psychology.

In recent months asylum seekers have once again become front page news in many British
newspapers with headlines including: „It‟s good but I don‟t like the food says asylum seeker:
130 migrants move into top hotel‟ (Daily Express, 25th September 2014). While this may
reflect a broader increase in stories about immigration making headline news it is also
reminiscent of press coverage of forced migrants at the start of the 21st century. This article
explores the way in which asylum seekers and refugees have been discursively constructed
by the print media in both the UK and Australia between 2001 and 2010. 40 articles were
selected for analysis following a discursive psychological approach (Potter and Wetherell,
1987). It was found that the print media, in both the UK and Australia, draw on a number of
interpretative repertoires when constructing accounts of refugees and asylum seekers. The
principal repertoire found to be used was that of the „unwanted invader‟, which was achieved
through the use of metaphors of criminals and water. However, this repertoire was found to
be used differently in both media; in Australia the focus was on border protection and
keeping „these‟ people out of the country, whereas in the UK the repertoire was used
predominantly to convince the reader that refugees and asylum seekers needed to be removed
from the country. Consideration is also given to how these accounts changed over the period
and what the implications may be now that the topic has once again returned to the front
pages of our daily newspapers.

This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. Sacks’s original analyses – concerned with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction, discoverable in members’ actual activities – demonstrated a means of doing sociology that had previously seemed impossible. In so doing, Sacks provided for highly technical, detailed, yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social organisation. In this original collection, scholars working in a range of different fields, including sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, social psychology, and linguistics, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired, influenced, and shaped by Sacks’s approach, as well as how their current research is taking Sacks’s legacy forward in new directions. As such, the collection is intended to provide both an introduction to, and critical exploration of, the work of Harvey Sacks and its continued relevance for the analysis of contemporary society.

Table of Contents
1. On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations

Robin James Smith, Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley

2. Discovering Sacks

Rod Watson

3. Action, Meaning and Understanding: Seeing Sociologically with Harvey Sacks

Michael Mair and Wes Sharrock

4. Sacks’ Plenum: The Inscription of Social Orders

Andrew P. Carlin

5. From Ethnosemantics to Occasioned Semantics: The Transformative Influence of Harvey Sacks

Jack Bilmes

6. Sacks, Categories, Language, and Gender

Elizabeth Stokoe, Bogdana Huma, Derek Edwards

7. A Most Remarkable Fact, for All Intents and Purposes: The Practical Matter of Categorical Truths

Jessica Robles

8. Sacks: On Omni-relevance and the Layered Texture of Interaction

Richard Fitzgerald

9. Membership Categorization and the Sequential Multimodal Organisation of Action: Walking, Perceiving, and Talking in Material-spatial Ecologies

Lorenza Mondada

10. Revisiting Sacks’s Work on Greetings: the "First Position" for Greetings

Christian Licoppe

11. Sacks, Silence, and Self-(de)selection

Eliot M. Hoey

12. Using Observation as a Basis for Theorising: Children’s Interaction and Social Order

Susan Danby

13. Membership Categorisation and the Notion of "Omni-relevance" in Everyday Family Interactions

Sara Keel

14. Sacks and the Study of the Local Organisation of Second Language Lessons

Ricardo Moutinho

15. Categorisation Practices, Place, and Perception: Doing Incongruities and the Commonplace Scene as ‘Assembled Activity’

Robin James Smith

16. On Sacks and the Analysis of Racial Categories-in-Action

Kevin A. Whitehead

17. Harvey Sacks, Membership Categorisation, and Social Media

William Housley

Acest articol trece în revistă principalele caracteristici teoretice si metodologice ale psihologiei sociale discursive, ilustrînd scopul şi natura acestei perspective şi arătînd modul in care aceasta poate respecifica psihologia socială a atitudinilor. După ce voi prezenta cîteva aspecte ale teoriei psihologiei discursive, mă voi opri asupra ceea ce se numeşte psihologia socială a atitudinilor. Studiul atitudinilor a fost una din principalele teme de cercetare ale psihologiei sociale şi este un bun punct de plecare pentru oricine doreşte să înţeleagă ce oferă psihologia discursivă din perspectiva rediscutării şi reconceptualizării unor noţiuni tradiţionale ale psihologiei sociale.

That talk is never disinterested complicates the relationship between the environment and the claims people make about it. Talk about place, and one's self in it, is particularly complex when the environment poses risk or is otherwise problematized. This study, a secondary analysis of interview data, seeks to extend discursive work on place-identity by examining the ways in which 14 residents of a small English village talk about themselves and their locale. The locale accommodates an active quarry, and many residents had lodged complaints to the quarry about dust, noise and vibrations from blasting. Attention to the interactional context of the interviews illustrates the ways in which (simply) interviewing people about their locale can threaten self- and place-identity. When asked about life in the village, interviewees oriented to two main dilemmas in protecting self- and place-identity: (1) how to justify continued residence in a challenging environment and (2) how to complain about the locale whilst maintaining positive place-identity. Discursive responses to these dilemmas drew upon typical identity processes, such as self- and place distinctiveness and the formulation of out-groups, as well as upon constructions of localized power-sharing and morally obligated tolerance of risk. We suggest that research on problematical places, and of environmental risk, needs to be sensitized to how it may constitute a threat to self- and place-identity, and how this may mediate formulations self and place, as well as of environmental risk.

This paper is both an overview of the status of contemporarydiscursive psychologyand aresponse to Corcoran'scritical article.The first partofthe paper reports on the main traditions that makeu pc ontemporaryd iscursive psychologya nd how they relate to one another.T hen it responds to Corcoran'sc laims that much of contemporary discursive psychology: (a) is over concerned with epistemic issues at the expense of ontological issues; (b) is too concerned with data purity while failing reflexively to address its own practices; (c) fails to address ethical, applied, and political issues in the wayt hat ar eformed 'ontological' discursive psychologyw ould be able to; (d) fails to provide an adequate and rich account of relationality (of the kind offered by thinkers such as Bakhtin, Shotter,and Chouliaraki). The limitations of each point are addressed in turn, highlighting errors and confusions. The broadly epistemic focus is appropriate for the subject matter of discursive psychology;discursive psychologyisless concerned with data purity than with pursuing the radical and empirically progressivepossibilities in studying records of people living their lives in everydaya nd institutional settings (a surprising oversightinadiscipline focused on the actions of human beings) and it has ar eflexivet radition going back two decades; it has as trong and distinctivef ocus on ethical, applied, and political issues; it has an account of relationality that is grounded in conversational materials. As ingle example from interaction on ac hild protection helpline is analysed to illustrate the wayr elationality,k nowledge,a nd intersubjectivity have been made analytically tractable in contemporaryd iscursive research.

Teasing is artful work, often used to convey messages that may seem negative or hurtful towards a recipient, but in a way that suggests the opposite. It is an extremely difficult concept to define, however; what one individual may consider a tease, another may consider an insult. In the current paper, data from an on-going PhD project was used to demonstrate some of the issues surrounding defining a concept such as teasing. Nine student groups from two UK universities were video recorded as they worked, before episodes of teasing were identified in the resultant data corpus, and used to exemplify some of the issues involved in defining what teasing actually looks like in interaction. Primarily, the paper demonstrates the importance of considering teasing as a collaborative interaction, and so past definitions that consider a tease as something one individual does to another, are questioned.

In 2009 a US based television programme, The View, discussed the arrest of film director Roman Polanski. Polanski was wanted for six outstanding charges related to the rape of Samantha Gailey in 1977. During this episode of the The View, Whoopi Goldberg made a controversial statement that Polanksi was not guilty of 'rape-rape'. This statement along with the long history of Polanski's avoidance of incarceration, illustrates the ongoing challenges for feminists to confront the trivialization of sexual coercion and violence. Goldberg's comments initiated an enthusiastic response on online forums and reinvigorated debates around definitions of rape. In this paper, I analyse online discussions on a feminist blog using discourse analysis (Parker, 2014) and the importance of considering the interrelated concepts of consent/non-consent, pleasure/distress and power in understanding the complexity and diversity of experiences of sexual violence.

"This paper attempts to unpack the far-reaching theoretical and practical issues that underlay the classical debate between cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser and discursive social psychologists Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter on Watergate witness John Dean’s memory (Edwards and Potter, 1992b; Neisser, 1982b). Accounting for their disagreements, Neisser claimed the mantle of the cognitive-ecological approach to memory and emphasized the psychologist’s ultimate priority of truth over discourse, while Edwards and Potter claimed that of discursive/rhetorical psychology and focused exclusively on discourse over truth. As such, the debate at the time ended in mutual misunderstanding and the shadow of theoretical incommensurability. However, as will be argued, a reanalysis of the arguments strongly suggests that Neisser was right about truth when he intuitively sensed the importance of discourse, and Edwards and Potter were right about discourse when they did not lose sight of truth. Therefore, beyond the impasse there has remained a promise inherent in the debate: it demonstrated an imaginative attempt to undermine the absolute dichotomy of truth and rhetoric and demonstrate their mutual inter-dependence. The concluding section will attempt to draw some implications of this promise and sketch out the possibility of a discipline which is not fragmented between received divisions and methods but unified on the basis of things characteristically human: moral sense and political values.

Keywords: Rhetorical psychology, discursive psychology, ecological study of memory, truth, cognition, discourse"

This paper provides an overview of the development and application of focus groups. It rethinks the conventional history associated with this approach in at least four ways. We reinsert a forgotten pioneer of focus groups, Herta Herzog, into our narrative. Secondly, we trace the emergence of group-based research to the work of applied psychologists in the early twentieth century and argue that the conditions of possibility for the uptake of this method were contingent on the asking of “why” questions. We follow the thread of “why” questions from the applied psychologists through to motivation research and the promotion of focus groups by Herzog to practitioners. Exploring the literature on motivation research unearths a further novel contribution: we excavate the use of “interpretative focus groups” by this community of practice. In addition, our close reading of motivation research and focus groups permits us to problematise the distinctions made by Calder [1977. “Focus Groups and the Nature of Qualitative Marketing Research.” Journal of Marketing Research 14: 353–364]. We subsequently trace the uptake of this methodology in the tobacco industry as a means of making an epistemological and political argument for the greater use of focus groups. Initially, we do so by charting the rise of social constructionism and non-individualistic consumer research. This enables us to navigate the highways and byways of discursive psychology, interpretive research, Consumer Culture Theory and on to feminist and Critical Marketing Studies. The engagement with focus groups with respect to the latter traditions is woefully underdeveloped. Our political argument is that focus group methodology can speak to the interests of many constituents in marketing theory and practice. It is not wedded to any specific social or political agenda. This means that its potential contribution to the study of consumption, markets and culture is multi-faceted.

This study focuses on parent-child argumentation to single out the argumentative strategies most frequently used by parents to resolve in their favor the process of negotiation occurring during the argumentative dialogues with their children at mealtime. Findings of the analysis of 132 argumentative dialogues between parents and children indicate that parents mostly use arguments based on the notions of quality and quantity in food-related discussions. The parents use other types of arguments such as the appeal to consistency, the arguments from authority, and the arguments from analogy, in discussions related to the teaching of the correct behavior in social situations within and outside the family context, e.g., in the school context with teachers and peers. The results of this study bring to light how parents and children contribute to co-constructing the dialogic process of negotiating their divergent opinions.

In this article, I dissect an excerpt from George W. Bush's address to a joint session of Congress and the American people wherein the former President of the United States (POTUS) uttered the (catch)phrase the 'war on terror' (WOT). To accomplish this dissection, I apply Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) together with Lacanian psychoanalysis among other critical tools. My aim here is to deconstruct/recode the WOT discourse in the hope of opening up possibilities for alternative, and more constructive, counter-discourses on the social problem of 'terrorism' that afford multiple subject positions beyond the (counter)terrorism binary. As an Orientalist ideology, the WOT indexes the larger archive of Amer-ican exceptionalism and can be traced back to the rise of the neo-conservative movement in the 1980s. This analysis is particularly relevant in the context of the current political climate in the United States, where the WOT rhetoric continues to normalise the logic of Islamophobia.

The opposing positions of the social model of disability and the biomedical framework of impairment have created tensions regarding what constitutes ‘normality’. In this article, we drew upon focus group data of parents, professionals, and people with autism, to explore how the dilemmatic tensions of normality and abnormality and of disability and ability were managed. Our findings illustrate how the boundaries of normality in relation to autism are blurred, as well as how the autistic identity is fluid. The members of the focus group invoked their epistemic rights to assert their positions and delicately considered the limitations of the rhetoric of cure. Our findings have implications for professionals working with families of children with autism, specifically as they aim to maintain a balance between providing sufficient support and not being intrusive, and we show how a medical sociology can facilitate an understanding of autism as a social category.