Critical Psychology - Michelle Fine

This issue looks at "counter stories" from subordinate groups - stories with which such groups seek to interrupt, contradict, expose, challenge or deny the dominant discourses which frame them. It presents a set of "counter stories": from marginalised groups of youth, indigenous peoples, racially oppressed groups, "queered subjects", and from women and men convicted of crimes. These stories can be read "under the covers" of the master narratives of our times.;Counter stories help to generate shared understandings, critique and meanings; they circulate within a group as a kind of counterreality, challenging old ways of looking at the world and making new ones. Thus they can be conceptualised as a form of politics: indeed part of the intention of this issue is to locate the production of counter stories within the framework of a new politics of resistance. Such a politics operates beyond the level of discourse, since material power and control can no longer be separated from symbolic systems in an age in which information, media and communication have become the post-industrial resource. Our aim is to make use of our symbolic capital in order to facilitate the telling, and theorising, of other stories.