Prf Paul Stenner

Professional biography

I have held a Chair in Social Psychology at The Open University (OU) since September 2011. Prior to that I was Professor of Psychosocial Studies in the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton. I have also held lectureships and senior lectureships in Psychology at University College London, The University of Bath and The University of East London. I like to collaborate with colleagues nationally and internationally in various ways. I was a core member of the Beryl Curt Collective and am on the Steering Group of the UK Psychosocial Studies Network. As a lifelong Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, I spent a year (2002-2003) in the Department of Law (Institut für Arbeits-, Wirtschafts- und Zivilrecht) at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, working on emotional dimensions of human rights. I have held, or currently hold, honourary positions at the Department of Social and Biological Communication at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the University of Brighton, the University of Bath and University College London, and I have recently taught courses at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico.

At the OU I direct the Culture and Social Psychology Research Group  (CUSP).

Research interests

I have contributed to the development of a critical and reflexive approach to social psychology that takes process and relationality as keynotes at that is known as a transdisciplinary psychosocial approach.

The word 'transdisciplinary' here indicates an effort to move across, between and beyond disciplines whilst maintaining an integrative focus on the problem of experience. I think it is important that psychological processes (e.g. emotional experiences, memories, styles of thinking, subjective senses of identity) be understood as embodied processes that unfold in concrete historical and cultural contexts, and usually as part of networks of social communication. This makes history, anthropology, biology and so forth relevant, but in a way that emphasizes the experiential dimensions of their various subject matters. Transdisciplinarity does not deny the relevance of disciplines, but is about attending to the disciplinary borderlines, interfaces and other liminal spaces in which change and development occur.

The word 'psychosocial' marks a difference from the standard U.S. and European approach to social psychology. This standard approach is a disciplinary form of social technology that involves approaching problems of social influence, social perception, and social cognition as if they were describable and explainable as a causally related collection of discrete factors and variables. From a critical perspective, this standard approach can itself be seen as a rather unusual way of thinking, communicating and acting: a peculiar psychosocial form of life that is only understandable once we locate it in its various historical and cultural contexts. In other words, it should be part of the subject matter of a 'second order' social psychology (psychosocial studies) which affirms that a) all social issues and problems have psychological dimensions but that b) these dimensions need always to be addressed in relation to the historical, cultural and institutional circumstances of a social and material milieu. In this way we can begin to see how, particularly in modern neo-liberal societies, psychological knowledge and expertise has taken on a social life of its own, influencing the ways in which people make sense of their own subjectivity and relationships, and doing so in a way that can contribute directly to contemporary forms of governance and social regulation.

The bulk of my own contributions to this approach can be classified into three interdependent strands: empirical, theoretical and methodological.

Empirical research

Long ago in my doctoral research, the main empirical challenge I set myself was to identify the social intelligibility structures that variously pattern the understanding of jealousy and shape its experience. My continuing empirical concern with the emotional aspects of experience and communication is reflected in a series of articles on affectivity, love, and on the relationship between human rights and emotions. The rights and emotions focus continued a series of empirical studies on the ethical and aspirational aspects of subjectivity associated with contested concepts like authenticity, sincerity, maturity and independence. In each of these studies I was concerned with the ways in which experiences are negotiated and articulated in the context of historically occasioned modes of communication, often intricately associated with forms of governance. My recent studies of Human Rights, Quality of Life and Activity (as in 'active ageing') respond to the fact that, for better or for worse, these have become associated with globally dominant discourses and techniques of governance in recent years, and to the fact that the subjective dimension is key to their operation. In a series of studies exploring health issues ranging from IBS to sexual health and addiction, I have also made empirical contributions to an innovative experience-oriented critical health psychology. In collaboration with various others, I have received:

• An AHRC Landscape and Environment Programme grant for a project entitled 'Writing the landscape of everyday life: lay narratives of the home garden' (with A. Church [PI] and M. Bhatti, awarded 2006)
• A Joint Research Councils New Dynamics of Aging grant for a project entitled 'Psychometric testing of the multidimensional questionnaire and the causal model of quality of life under-pinning it' (with A. Bowling [PI], D. Banister, K. Sproston and H. Titherige, awarded 2007).
• A Research for Patient Benefit Programme grant from the National Institute for Health Research (with Carol McCrum, Sussex Health Care Trust, and Ann Moore and Vinette Cross, University of Brighton). An exploration of self-care in chronic low-back disorder from the perspective of practitioners and patients: a Q methodological study (awarded 2011).

Theoretical and historical research

The critique and reformulation of social psychology has demanded quite extensive engagement with social theory and philosophy. The theoretical framework I developed in the context of my PhD thesis drew heavily upon post-structuralism, hermeneutics and ordinary language philosophy. This framework was collaboratively elaborated in the books 'Textuality and Tectonics' and 'Social Psychology: a critical agenda'. Since that time my theoretical publications have concentrated on the process thinking of figures like Whitehead, James, Heidegger, Langer, Foucault, Deleuze, Stengers, Serres, Girard, and Luhmann. The process orientation I adopt stresses the relevance of history and future oriented creativity to social psychology, and also the multiplicity of perspectives in a shifting environment of power dynamics. A book with Professor Steve Brown assembles some of these theoretical resources into the form of a Psychology without Foundations (Sage, 2009). My theoretical development was greatly enriched thanks to funding from a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellowship (awarded in 2002) and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship. In 2017 I wrote a book called Liminality and Experience: A transdisciplinary approach to the psychosocial (Palgrave). My work on liminal experience forms the centrepiece of a volume edited by Brady Wagoner and Tania Zittoun entitled Experience on the Edge: theorizing liminality (Springer, 2021). In 2022 I co-authored (with Graham Richards) the 4th Edition of a work on the history of psychology entitled Putting Psychology in it's Place (Routledge).

Methodological research

The task of developing a psychology in dialogue with the social sciences raises methodological issues, and I have devoted research energies to interpretive methods and forms of pattern analysis. In my PhD I invented a type of discursive analysis involving the decomposition of a given text into coherent themes reflecting dynamics of subject positioning as these unfold in social processes. Thematic Decomposition has since been taken up and used in fields such as health psychology, feminist psychology, the study of relationships, and sexuality studies. I have also written extensively on the use of Q methodology to identify (using an 'inverted' form of factor analysis) the range of discursive positions that can be adopted on a given issue, and to explore, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the structure and function of those accounts. My efforts to frame Q as a critical 'qualiquantological' mixed method grounded in process thinking have been quite influential amongst the growing Q methodology community and my textbook with Simon Watts called Doing Q methodological Research (Sage, 2012) has been widely cited.

Application

A 2017 Special Issue of the journal Theory and Psychology introduces the concept of a liminal hotspot introduced by Monica Greco, Johanna Motzkau and I. The volume contains a number of applications to real-life topics varying from cyberbullying in schools, the management of drug problems, and medical practice around so-called MUS (medically unexplained symptoms). A current application deals with the politics of Brexit. Contemporary professional and lay practice across a range of domains such as these struggles with the need to handle multiple rationalities informed by various disciplinary logics and forms of evidence, and to coordinate these in an ongoing pursuit of 'best practice'. The practical difficulty in handling and translating the often contradictory forms of evidence generated by such distinct empistemological realms is particularly compounded during circumstances in which specialist rationalities reach their limit.

When dealing with MUS, for instance, authoritative health knowledge reaches its limit and falters, and when dealing with child witnesses, the legal presupposition of an autonomously rational subject can run up against its limit. If specialist knowledge provides professionals with a procedural rationality ('know how') that supplies a pratical orientation for professionals and clients alike, then such limits constitute points of practical impasse or paralysis.

Under such circumstances, attributions of a psychological nature typically come to characterise, either explicitly or implicitly, the forms of communication at play in practice. The spectre of the 'suggestibility' of child-witnesses, for instance, echoes the medical concern with the 'psychogenic' causation of symptoms and the 'placebo' effects of treatments. But due to the necessarily liminal nature of the practice situation at play, such attributions are essentially contestable, unstable and usually controversial if not conflictual (their characteristic feature is subjectivity). Our programme of research thus focuses on fields of practice characterised by stalemates (paralysis) and controversy (polarisation) associated with certain distinctively contemporary forms of liminality that are haunted by 'subjectivity'. We adapt the anthropological concept of liminality to include contemporary situations characterised by 'gaps' in structures of practice: gaps, paradoxes and voids in (or during) which the procedural rationalities of the social structure falter and are held in suspense. Such gaps, however, are also implicated in creative pattern shifts during which new modes of practice and knowledge are invented and put to work. Our approach to concrete practice situations thus entails a focus upon the destructive /productive activity of gaps, paradoxes and voids as these are implicated in the undoing of existing structural arrangements, and in the genesis of novel structure.

With systemic therapist Maria Nichterlein I have written the opening chapter to the Routledge International Handbook of Postmodern Therapies, and the chapters is entitled We have always been Postmodern: A new past for a future Postmodern Therapy. I also collaborate with a group of neurodivergent academics who study neurodiversity in a project called 'Odd one's in' which aims to improve the welfare and wellbeing of neurodivergent people.

PhD supervision

I have supervised 11 PhD students to succesful completion and have examined over 30.I am willing to consider taking on new PhD students working critically within psychology related fields (critical psychology, discursive psychology, psychosocial studies), and am particularly interested in empirical (typically, but not exclusively, qualitative) applications of process perspectives. Domains of particular interest to me are: affectivity and the emotions; genealogies of subjectivity; liminal experiences; health related issues (particularly 'contested' or unexplained illnesses).

A repository of research publications and other research outputs can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.

Teaching interests

Social psychology. History and philosophy of psychology. Module Team Member of  Advancing Social Psychology (DD317).

Impact and engagement

An accessible introduction to my work was presented in the form of an interview with the Editor of The Psychology: Stenner, P and Sutton, J. (2018) ‘This incitement to “become different” can be both thrilling and terrifying’: Psychologist Editor Jon Sutton meets social psychologist Professor Paul Stenner. The Psychologist  31, March 2018: 50-53.

Nominated academic (NA) on the BBC4/OU documentary Freud: Genius of the Modern World (BBC4 June 2016). 

Expert appearence on the South Bank Show (2006) and on Radio 4 'Emotional rollercoaster'.