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The Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice spans cultures and disciplines to highlight critical paradigms and practices for the study of social injustice in diverse contexts. This book addresses injustice along such lines as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and social class. It also addresses pressing issues of globalization, conflict, intervention, and social policy.

The 20th century witnessed not only the devastation of war, conflict, and injustice on a massive scale, but also the emergence of social psychology as a discipline committed to addressing these and other social problems. In the 21st century, the promise of social psychology remains incomplete. We witness the reprise of authoritarianism and the endurance of institutionalized forms of oppression such as sexism, racism, and heterosexism across the globe. This volume reorients social psychology toward the study of social injustice in real-world settings. Contributors cross borders between cultures and disciplines to highlight new and emerging critical paradigms that interrogate the consequences of social injustice. United in their belief in the possibility of liberation from oppression, the authors of this book offer a blueprint for a new kind of social psychology.

Since the late 19th century, Jews and Arabs have been locked in an intractable battle for national recognition in a land of tremendous significance. This book offers an analysis of the consequences of conflict for the psyche before addressing the mutual constitution of culture and mind through the process of life-story construction

In a renewed call for interpretive psychological science, this paper argues for narrative as an integrative concept to interrogate mental experience and human development in social and political context. Master narrative engagement is defined as the process by which individuals engage with and internalize competing storylines of history and identity perceived as socially compulsory. Narrative science is concerned with individual responses to these master narratives and the extent to which elements of them become integrated into autobiographies. A narrative approach is posited as better able to capture the reality of lives in context and to enable possibilities for social and political transformation than variable-centered experimental science, which continues to dominate psychology.

Scholars across a range of disciplines have increasingly argued that the intractability of political conflicts is rooted in the proliferation of competing historical narratives. These collective narratives construct the basis of a sense of shared collective identity. Narrative and identity are thus increasingly conceptualized as fundamental to the maintenance and reproduction of political conflict. In this paper, I explore two underlying conceptions of identity that have emerged in the literature on youth and political conflict. One conception views identity as a <i>burden</i> for youth, suggesting that youth perceive the need to internalize a master narrative of collective identity that provides a sense of security and solidarity in the midst of existential uncertainty. Though psychologically beneficial, this internalization is problematic in the reproductive role it assumes in the larger conflict. An alternative conception views identity as a <i>benefit</i> in its ability to serve as a tool for social and political change, particularly for low-status groups. I review theory and research that adopt these varying conceptions and suggest that identity must be conceptualized as both burden and benefit for youth in conflict settings.

Guided by theories of narrative identity, racial identity development, andFreire's (1970)notion of conscientização, this paper presents an interpretive analysis of Barack Obama's personal narrative. Obama's narrative represents a progressive story of self‐discovery in which he seeks to develop a configuration of identity (Erikson, 1959;Schachter, 2004) that reconciles his disparate contexts of development and the inherited legacy of racism and colonialism. A major theme of his story centers on his quest to discover an anchor for his identity in some community of shared practice. Ultimately, he settles on a distinctly cosmopolitan identity in which he can foster conversation across axes of difference both within himself and among diverse communities. I discuss the extent to which election of a candidate with this personal narrative of cosmopolitan identity reflects a shifting master narrative of identity politics within the United States, as well as implications for Obama's policy platform and governance style.

Through the application of life course theory to the study of sexual orientation, this paper specifies a new paradigm for research on human sexual orientation that seeks to reconcile divisions among biological, social science, and humanistic paradigms. Recognizing the historical, social, and cultural relativity of human development, this paradigm argues for a moderate stance between essentialism and constructionism, identifying (a) the history of sexual orientation as an identity category emerging from the medical model of homosexuality in the late 1800s; (b) the presence of same-sex desire across species, history, and cultures, revealing its normality; (c) an underlying affective motivational force which organizes sexual desire within individuals, and (d) the assumption of a sexual identity in response to the identity and behavioral possibilities of a culture. This framework considers the biology of sexual desire while simultaneously acknowledging the socially constructed nature of identity and the historical foundations of sexual orientation as a meaningful index of human identity.