Managing culturality in mediation sessions: Insights from membership categorization analysis and discursive psychology

This chapter introduces the fields of membership categorization analysis and discursive psychology. These fields can be used to analyze many types of discourse; in this chapter, we are concerned with their application to the analysis of mediation sessions that involve a mediator and parties in conflict. Membership categorization analysis focuses on tracing the deployment of identity categories by interactants during exchanges. This emergent self- and other-ascription of identity categories has been termed interculturality. Discursive psychology is interested in the discursive manifestation of psychological matters such as the attribution of causality. This is pertinent in conflict mediation sessions which generally give rise to versions of the past that attribute blame. Combining the two fields of membership categorization analysis and discursive psychology provides a method for examining how parties in conflict mediation sessions manage cultural identity categories and provide inferences based on category-resonant descriptions regarding responsibility for the past and present situation.