Abstract: This talk addresses a persistent difficulty in my own work and, I suspect, in the field more broadly. Put plainly, social psychology still lacks a settled way of apprehending the social that moves beyond Allport’s mid-twentieth-century decree on the discipline’s remit. I will focus on two thematic issues to illustrate how this problem currently plays out.
The first concerns the way in which much of what is implied by “the social” in research is relegated to the ill‑defined conceptual rubbish bin of context. Context is routinely invoked as an explanation for empirical findings, yet it is almost always treated as self‑evident and theoretically underspecified. It carries few discernible commitments: almost anything seems to count, and there is rarely consistency across studies by the same researcher, let alone across the field. This is a serious problem, as the context of anything is fundamentally indeterminate—it has no reliable boundary and no stable content. The only constructive response I will offer in this talk emerges from this impasse. Drawing on my fieldwork in rural India, I outline a pragmatic attempt to sharpen our conceptualisation of context, and our allusions to it, through a tripartite theorisation of research context. This aims to afford the concept analytical traction without imposing false closure.
Returning to these difficulties, I then reflect on how my engagement with a range of theoretical perspectives has shaped my methodological decisions in the search for the social. My research group primarily works with texts (written, transcribed, or visually presented thoughts) and treats them as privileged yet partial traces of social life. We approach them as sites in which meaning, positioning, and orientation become available for analysis. This orientation has led me, at different moments, to privilege content, distribution, and temporal patterning as entry points into the social. In retrospect, however, these moves appear largely as methodological artefacts – whether assembled through mathematical time-series modelling, thematic analysis, or dialogical approaches – that stubbornly persist. In each case, the social became analytically tractable only by being narrowed. Some of the social, always remained poorly captured: depending on the methodology, this took the form of relational, interactional, or socio‑material processes through which texts were produced, circulated, and taken up.
One minor theoretical proposition on the research context aside, the purpose of this talk is not to offer solutions, but to initiate conversation, collaboration, and dialogue in the ongoing search for the social, and indeed in negotiating the tension between its analytic capture and its inevitable loss.