This paper explores an accepted but under researched feature of national categories: their complex relationship with social constructions of place. We argue that social psychological work on national identification and mobilization would benefit from closer attention to this relationship. In order to develop this argument, we analyse a series of newspaper accounts published on behalf of the Countryside Alliance, a coalition formed to preserve rural 'ways of life' in the UK and, more specifically, to defend extant practices of hunting. Applying a discourse analytic method, we show how the Alliance has exploited the rhetoric of place in order to portray the preservation of hunting as an issue of national significance. By associating British identity with the 'rural idyll' of the English countryside, the organization has appealed to a place construction in which hunting and its associated activities become cast as essential expressions of the national character. Building on relevant work in geography and discursive psychology, we trace some wider implications of this process for social psychological research on category construction, reification and collective mobilization.

This paper investigates the interactional construction of neighbour relationships in the context of disputational talk. Neighbour dispute data were recorded in two contexts: community mediation and televised documentaries. The data were transcribed and subsequently analysed using an approach that combined ethnomethodological methods with discursive psychology, focusing on participants' orientations to and constructions of spatial categories and place formulations. Three broad themes emerged from our analysis. First, we found that the construction and regulation of normative neighbour relationships were formulated in a discourse of spatial practice. Second, we found that, through complaints about spatial transgressions and 'good' and 'bad' neighbours, the moral order was reproduced and maintained. Finally, we found that, although participants were oriented to a distinction between 'private' and 'public' spaces, talk about boundaries revealed the highly contingent nature of spatial division. We suggest that in order to better understand neighbour relationships, social psychologists must explore the way people construct and account for the spaces they interact within.

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Learning and teaching researchers have consistently identified a mismatch between student and tutor expectations and goals. With student diversity increasing along with widening access, student perceptions, misconceptions and attitudes may be just as important to learning and teaching psychology as individual ability and knowledge. We set out in this paper to explore the accounts given by newly recruited psychology students of their beliefs and understandings about the subject of psychology and how psychology students learn. Our findings suggest that, although some of these students' understandings are consistent with the psychology undergraduate programme, there are also beliefs that present challenges and opportunities to tutors and programme designers. At the very least, we suggest, that engagement in an exercise similar to that undertaken in this study may be valuable in enhancing understanding and reshaping the beliefs and expectations of both students and tutors.