Selling Fish (Sitamarhi, India)

At the street fish market, achieved meanings rely on performance. Fishmongers rely on highly performative acts of communication to convince buyers that their stock is fresh.

Culture and Society as systems of and for meanings.

Our theoretical foundation rests on the premise that meanings and everyday life emerge through communication and interaction, and these meanings, in turn, constitute culture and knowledge. This mutually constitutive relationship between meaning and culture, and the social world guides all our research.

We apply this framework across diverse research problems, tracing how meanings develop, circulate, transform, and solidify in social life. For example, we examine health-related meaning-making, exploring how culturally situated knowledge systems shape understandings of health and guide healthcare decisions. We also analyse how everyday language and discourse organize collective interpretations of social realities.

A special area of interest is marginality and inequality. Here, we investigate how disadvantage is produced, represented, and reproduced through communication and cultural meaning systems. Our work has examined representations of poverty in the UK and India, the stigma surrounding homelessness in the UK, and beliefs towards schools in deprived communities to show how meanings and experiences are collectively shaped. Current projects are grounded in the cultural contexts of the Indian subcontinent, China, and the Arab world.

Methodologically, we operate at the intersection of cultural and social psychology and constantly reflect if our tools fit the contexts which we study. Our approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, including time series analysis. We are particularly interested in developing novel approaches that enable collective-level analysis that capture shared meanings and experiences. This has led us to focus on the large-scale analysis of micro-texts, where we trace how meanings circulate and solidify across communicative contexts.

We aim to advance both theoretical understanding of culture-meaning dynamics and empirical insights into how collective meaning systems shape lived experience and social inequality.