Intellectual disability is usually thought of as a form of internal, individual affliction, little different from diabetes, paralysis or chronic illness. This study, the first book-length application of discursive psychology to intellectual disability, shows that what we usually understand as being an individual problem is actually an interactional, or social, product. Through a range of case studies, which draw upon ethnomethodological and conversation analytic scholarship, the book shows how persons categorized as 'intellectually disabled' are produced, as such, in and through their moment-by-moment interaction with care staff and other professionals. Mark Rapley extends and reformulates current work in disability studies and offers a reconceptualisation of intellectual disability as both a professionally ascribed diagnostic category and an accomplished - and contested - social identity. Importantly, the book is grounded in data drawn from naturally-occurring, rather than professionally orchestrated, social interaction.

In a context of wide media attention to public debates about the social, political and epistemic entitlements of different groups within Australian society, an understanding of the rhetorical resources and the discursive work doen by differing constructions of `race', has become an important local issue. This article examines data from discussions between two groups of (non-indigenous) university students on a range of contemporary issues concerning race relations in Australia. Participants drew on four common discursive themes when discussing Aboriginal people. These were: an imperialist narrative of Australian history exculpatory of colonialism; an economic-rationalist/neo-liberal discourse of `productivity' and entitlement managing accountability for a contemporary Aboriginal `plight'; a local discourse of balance and even-handedness which discounted the seriousness of discrimination and racism in Australia; and a nationalist discourse stressing the necessity of all members collectively identifying as `Australian'. These interpretative resources are illustrated and discussed in terms of their rhetorical organization and social consequences. The international pervasiveness of a range of modern racist tropes and the local cultural specificity of their working-up are discussed.

Australia has recently witnessed the resurgence of what has been termed the ‘race debate’. The apparently high levels of popular support from ‘ordinary’ Australians for MP Pauline Hanson's contentious views on immigration, Australia's indigenous peoples and her foreign relations have been a major theme of this debate. This paper employs the framework of discursive psychology to examine, in her maiden speech to Parliament, the way in which Pauline Hanson's political rhetoric is precisely constructed in order to emphasize the ordinariness, reasonableness and commonsensical mass appeal of her views. Particular attention is paid to the discursive deployment of self‐categorization to construct a version of herself as exemplifying ‘ordinary Australian‐ness’. The potential for recent work in discursive psychology both to complement and to challenge aspects of social identity theory inspired studies of political rhetoric is discussed. The analysis presented suggests that not only is it unnecessarily reductionistic to construe identity in talk in terms of dichotomous mental states, but also that the discursive construction of self‐ and social categories, and the establishing of the facticity of a position, need not be construed as separate aspects of the task of racist political rhetoric, but may be understood as mutually supporting components of successful mobilization discourse.

Contrary to received wisdom, 'acquiescence bias' in the responses of people with learning disabilities to questioning is not a simple phenomenon, and certainly not one to be laid at the door solely of people with learning disabilities themselves. Rather, it is probably an artefact of the conversational organization of interviews as tests. Analysis of Quality of Life assessment interviews show, we argue, that there is probably no uniform 'acquiescent' motivation which accounts for all inconsistencies and agreements that might be produced under such circumstances. Rather, the interview's logic produces a range of pseudo-acquiescent responses in the face of interviewers' reformulations, and their pursuit of plausible and acceptable answers. There is also evidence of 'anti-acquiescence', in which respondents resist pressure to change their answers. We conclude that the traditional notion of submissive, willing-to-please acquiescence is probably unsustainable on current evidence, and ought to be replaced by a more respectful account of the linguistic and interpersonal competence of people with learning disabilities.

Most psychological theories of rape tend to stress factors internal to both rapists and their victims in accounting for the phenomenon. Unlike such theories, social psychological and feminist accounts have drawn attention to social and cultural factors as productive of rape, and have criticized psychological accounts on the grounds that they often serve, paradoxically, to cement pre-existing 'common-sense'. In this paper we examine the ways in which young Australian men draw upon widely culturally shared accounts, or interpretative repertoires, of rape to exculpate rapists. In particular, we discuss the reliance placed on a 'lay' version of Tannen's (1992) 'miscommunication model' of (acquaintance) rape and detail the use of this account-the claim that rape is a consequence of men's 'not knowing'-as a device to accomplish exculpation. Implications of our methods for capturing young people's understanding of sexual coercion, rape and consent, and for the design of 'rape prevention' programmes, are discussed.

While several psychological theories of rape have been developed, Tannen's ‘ miscommunication’ model is dominant, informing ‘expert’ and popular accounts alike. Rape is constructed as an extreme example of miscommunication – whereby women's ‘failure’ to say ‘no’ is interpreted by men as sexual consent. Kitzinger and Frith have demonstrated that young women have an implicit understanding of the normative interactional structure of refusal, and it is this that explains their difficulty in ‘just saying no’ to unwanted sex. However, Kitzinger and Frith's study could not demonstrate, but only argue, that young men share this sophisticated understanding, such that women saying ‘no’ should not be necessary to refuse sexual intimacy. Here we extend Kitzinger and Frith's study, via the analysis of data from two focus groups held with young men. We demonstrate that, as Kitzinger and Frith suggested, men not only do have a refined ability to hear verbal refusals that do not contain the word ‘no’, but also – and importantly – an equally refined ability to ‘hear’ the subtlest of non-verbal sexual refusals.

A small-scale study of the inter-rater and staff:client reliability of the Schalock & Keith (1993) Quality of Life Questionnaire (QOL-Q) was conducted. Whilst the sample size was small and the QOL-Q achieved an acceptable overall level of reliability, the study replicated the pattern of low staff:client concordance and staff overestimation of the independence and autonomy of clients reported by Reiter & Bendov (1996). The results are briefly discussed in the context of the ongoing debate about the utility of proxy response in the literature.

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