The Psychology of Social Class: Murky Histories and Feminist Futures

This keynote aims to focus on the themes central to contemporary research and theory within mainstream psychology of class and, second, analyse the interrelationship with these and the history of psychological explanations of social class.  By doing this I will tease out a selection of ways in which the discipline of psychology has researched, theorised and practiced social class and how these ways have accounted for where we are now. Through this approach I will argue that the ‘psy’ disciplines have a history of classism that utilises individualism to shore up governmentality, regulation and pathologisation of the working-class. In addition, I will tackle head-on the ways in which this history has enabled notions of poverty, inequality and class oppression to become an ‘absent present’.

Despite what I will argue to have been a troubled, horrible history, I aim to highlight some feminist psychological work from past and present which have offered us opportunities to better understand working-class experience and life while ensuring we explicitly question the social conditions and practices that contribute to them. I will also argue that employing feminist methodology and theory, particularly from working-class academics and academics of colour, can create a different future that can agitate the White, male, middle-class standard to provide complex and intersectional accounts and allow for discourses that make present the murky status quo of the past.