This chapter aims to describe the psychology of nonbelonging through co-constructed accounts by informal settlement residents who belong – yet also struggle to not belong – to ‘non-places’ such as the informal settlement. It illustrates how (non)belonging is performed as unspoken affective senses of place that are resonant in narratives. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic insights, the chapter contributes to an expanded conceptualisation of ‘senses of place’ by showing that we also perform place belonging in an ‘unconscious’ sense – beyond our discursive performances (place identity) or expressed feeling states (place attachment). This epistemological stance highlights senses of place belonging as coordinated via an unspoken social contract with the hovering interlocutor (Other), who offers the navigational cues to situate where we are (place) and to define who we are (identity).

The concluding chapter seeks to develop a model of how human talk and action can be simultaneously expressive and repressive, and for understanding how a collective and ideological unsaid may be produced by human action. We draw together the contributions to this book, showing how these identify “signs of silence” and develop an analysis of the unsaid from qualitative studies of social interaction. We use ideas from ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discourse analysis to explain how the said and unsaid provide the ground for normative and accountable conduct, which, in turn, provides the foundation for qualitative studies of silence. We exploit the topographical metaphor of a “discursive terrain,” likening human action to paths that emerge to channel conduct along the contours of the said, and which simultaneously constitute the untrodden hinterlands of the unsaid. This “stigmergic” model of discursive action allows us to imagine how to bridge divides that are evident in the chapters of the book and elsewhere: between the conditions and outcomes of action and between discursive and psychoanalytic conceptions of the unsaid.

We open the book by showing – briefly, by a consideration of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission – how our social worlds are structured around silences and absences; and how even the process of unsilencing can lay down new absences. We explain why qualitative research in the social and human sciences has often neglected studying silences as it focused on the presences in talk, discourse, and interaction. We then provide a quick roadmap of the silence literature that has begun to gain momentum as part of what we cal, “a turn to silence.” Finally, we outline the perspectives and objectives of this book, arguing that qualitative studies are well suited to explore the unsaid, which we conceptualized as a slippery and multilayered form of social action. The chapter provides an overview of the collection and introduces the two broad questions answered by each of its contributors, namely: (1) “What is unsaid?” – focusing attention on methods, practices, and perspectives for identifying absence, and (2) “What is the unsaid doing (here)?” – focusing attention on the ideological significance of absence.

Even when the social order appears intractable, social change is constantly unfolding all around us, finding expression in the accumulation of small acts of resistance as much as in dramatic moments of revolution. Psychologists should take interest in the dynamics of social change, whether mundane or dramatic, for at least two reasons. First, the explanation of when and why change occurs – or fails to occur –requires analysis of ordinary people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. To understand fully the conditions under which people act in ways that support or challenge the status quo, we simply cannot afford to overlook the role of psychological factors. Second and related, processes of social change invite us to (re)appraise the moral and political implications of psychological knowledge. How do we reduce discrimination against others? When do we recognize and challenge social inequality and when do we accept or even endorse it? How can we create more inclusive forms of identity and community? Such questions elide the traditional division between scholarship and advocacy. They require us to demonstrate how psychological knowledge helps create a more just and tolerant society. Perhaps less comfortably, they require us to recognize how our discipline may be complicit in maintaining social inequalities.

In this chapter, we discuss two psychological models of social change, namely prejudice reduction and collective action. Both models focus on the problem of improving relations between groups to reduce social inequality and discrimination. However, they propose different psychological pathways to the achievement of this goal and prioritize different core questions. As we shall see, the prejudice reduction model primarily addresses the question “How can we get individuals to like one another more?” whereas the collective action model primarily addresses the question “How can we get individuals to mobilize together to challenge inequality?”

The first section of the chapter elaborates the fundamental principles and underlying assumptions of these models. The second section explores the relationship between the two models of change, focusing on the allegation that prejudice reduction exerts counterproductive effects on collective action. The chapter's conclusion advocates a contextualist perspective on social change. We hold that any evaluation of the efficacy of psychological models of change must remain sensitive to the “stubborn particulars” (Cherry, 1995) of local conditions and the affordances and obstacles embedded there.

In recent years there has been a sea-change in social psychology: away from theories of conscious, deliberate or explicit processing to theories and research of unconscious, automatic or implicit processing. Social information processing of all sorts has been discovered to proceed more or less automatically (Bargh, 1996). Dual process models of information processing propose that ‘effortful conscious reasoning takes place only under relatively rare circumstances, when people possess both cognitive capacity and strong motivation’ (Smith, 1996, p. 905).

From early on (Gaertner and McLaughlin, 1983), these theories of implicit cognition have been applied to understanding negative stereotypes and prejudice that people have for outgroups and their members. The research shows that stereotyping typically proceeds automatically as attention is drawn to race, gender and other characteristics of people unconsciously and unintentionally; and that this in turn shapes social judgements and evaluations of all sorts, also in automatic and unconscious ways (Banaji and Hardin, 1996; Dovidio et al., 1986; Fazio and Dunton, 1997; Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Wittenbrink et al., 1997).