Short abstract:

[Social] psychologists' individual actions as producers of knowledge in the field demonstrate the cultural orientation of the field more broadly. This association has implications for scientific practice, improvements in the outcomes of psychological science, and possibilities for radical change.

Long abstract:

I have argued (Brown, 2020) that psychologists should work to engage a new unit of analysis, one capacious enough to acknowledge the simultaneous instantiation of social structures as lived experiences/social lives, not as influential and external. In interviews with researchers studying social identity, I asked them to reflect on their scientific processes in addition to their own biographies (i.e., racialized individuals reflecting on how they study race as members of a scientific discipline and as racialized members of broader society). While some interviews functioned as brief conversations wherein qualitative data could be collected, others were a site to examine self-structure singularity (Brown, 2020). Participants confronted the inner workings of their discipline as made manifest through their own individual actions and the connection between disciplinary practices and the (re)production of neoliberalism, racism, etc. They then reflected on the nature of their disciplinary methods to make sense of contemporary realities related to social identity scholarship. In this paper I examine the interview experiences of two researchers of color, one occupying each of the positions I’ve articulated, as revelatory of the complex dynamics of selves and structures. I present interview data as well as my own reflections on the interview process. Through analyzing these data and reflecting on my own experiences, I present the space of the interview as a type of encounter where disciplinary practices are reflected upon (or ignored), radical change is imagined (or not considered), and the self is challenged (or not) as a conduit for perpetuating detrimental structural realities.