Citizenship and immigration in social psychology

In this chapter, we undertake a bottom-up, social psychological approach to (national) citizenship, analysing Greek interview talk on issues pertaining to immigration, adaptation, and citizenship (rights). We use, as theoretical and analytic stepping-stones, (a) Billig’s influential thesis on banal nationalism, (b) critical social psychological studies on Greek occidentalism, and (c) the conceptual and methodological “tool-kit” of critical discursive social psychology. Unfolding our analyses, we showcase how notions of “culture” and “cultural hierarchies” come to be animated within our data, informing the interactional accomplishment of a variety of rhetorical actions, while casually reproducing hegemonic ideological assumptions about culture(s) of the West and the Rest. Our overall argument is that the developing social psychology of citizenship should focus more persistently on the task of disentangling cultural politics working underway when citizenship issues are topicalised and dealt upon intelligibly and accountably by lay social actors in conversation.