The Social Psychology of Citizenship: Critical Advances and Interdisciplinary Insights

This book develops a social psychology of citizenship, pushing the boundaries of the discipline to articulate a theoretically rich social psychological framework for the study of citizenship.

Featuring contributions from established and up-and-coming global researchers, the book draws attention to the micro-politics of everyday life. The volume is divided into four parts considering different sites where citizenship is performed: governing, bordering, locating and re-imaging citizenship. Each part considers a particular dynamic of citizenship, and the volume features trans-disciplinary commentaries from expert scholars in other social sciences and humanities. The book also revisits core social psychological topics such as prejudice, intergroup relations and identities in new productive ways that foreground the power dynamics and ’battles of ideas’ playing out in often implicit ways. It provides a systematic, state-of-the-art presentation of key theoretical and empirical work in the social psychology of citizenship and extends citizenship studies to include under-explored topics in the field - such as the environment and precarity - using a critical and decolonial lens.

Bringing together an innovative framework that advances a framework for future study in the field, the book will be highly relevant reading for postgraduate students and researchers in social psychology, political psychology, community psychology, sociology and migration studies. It will also be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, activists and policy makers interested in citizenship and societal challenges.

Eleni Andreouli is Professor of Social Psychology at the Open University, United Kingdom. She is the author of numerous publications exploring the links between politics and everyday life.

Lia Figgou is Professor of Social Psychology, at the School of Psychology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests lie in the field of immigration, citizenship and intergroup relations. Influenced by the ＂turn to language＂ in social psychology, she employs rhetorical and discursive analysis to explore these topics in depth.

Irini Kadianaki is an Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cyprus. Her research explores the interplay between social representations and identity among stigmatized groups--such as migrants, LGBT+ individuals, and people with mental illness.