This special section highlights discursive psychology’s distinct place in and contribution to psychology, especially qualitative psychology. Discursive psychology (DP) is the study of how people deploy, orient to, and manage psychological matters in and for social interaction. The special section highlights how DP has, across several decades, contributed to and challenged qualitative and other forms of inquiry in psychology. The section contains articles that illustrate current innovation and developments in DP and which continue to drive its increasing visibility within the broader research landscape. In this introduction, we review and contextualize DP’s background and relationship to qualitative psychology

Children's understanding of disgust has been investigated experimentally from an individual perspective, but little is known about their expressions of disgust in everyday settings. Disgust has also been associated with, but not directly examined within, food refusal during mealtimes. Using a discursive psychological analysis of food disgust expressions in the home and preschool, this article examines how disgust becomes interactionally relevant at key moments within eating trajectories during everyday mealtimes. Data are taken from two corpora of video-recorded meals in Scotland (homes) and Sweden (preschool) with a focus on expressions such as bleurgh or ugh. The analyses evidence the production of children's disgust expressions at transitional moments during the meal, when food is brought to the table, to the plate, or to the mouth. The implications of the findings for work on disgust expressions and children's refusal of food during eating trajectories are discussed.

As one of the most basic forms of sociality, eating together (or “commens-ality”) has been extensively researched across the social sciences.Interactional research, for instance, has demonstrated how commensality iscollaboratively produced within and through moments of participation dur-ing shared mealtimes. In this article, I propose that there is a unique form ofparticipation—“co-eating”—in which one person’s eating practices becomesa collaborative activity. Using examples from children’s mealtimes, co-eatingis shown to be a means through which people scaffold, manage, or otherwiseengage in the current eating practices of co-present others. The concept ofco-eating provides an analytical resource through which researchers canempirically examine the granularity and fluidity of “eating together.” Thearticle situates the argument within academic literature and empirical workon commensality before illustrating co-eating with examples from existingliterature as well as data from a preschool lunch. Data are in Swedish, with English translation.

Mealtimes shared with other people define how, what, how much, and with whom we eat. On such occasions, whether in private or public spaces, and as formal or informal events, our eating practices are inseparable from our interactions with other people. In this Editorial for the Special Issue on Interactional approaches to eating together and shared mealtimes, we provide an overview of the interdisciplinary field of research on eating together and shared mealtimes to illustrate the breadth and depth of work that has been developed in this area to date. The overview is divided into three broad clusters of research that focus primarily on (1) cultural or societal aspects, (2) individual outcomes, or (3) interactional practices. Commonalities across these clusters are discussed, the need for more research across a greater global and cultural diversity of eating practices is highlighted, and the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration on research on eating together and shared mealtimes across diverse scientific disciplines is explored. The papers in this Special Issue showcase a sample of contemporary work from within the cluster of research on interactional practices, and a brief overview of these papers is discussed. Finally, it is argued that as a common area of interest, social interaction as the foundation of eating practices within shared mealtimes poses considerable potential for interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines, and between scientists, professionals, and participants from the study populations.

Language can be considered as not simply playing a role in behavior change but as being foundational to how we understand people's behavior in itself. Focusing on the use of discursive categories in everyday social interaction, this paper examines how dispositional categories (such as food "likes") become "sticky" through being invoked during one social action but treated as relatively stable over time and used to account for past and future behavior. Data are video recordings of children's eating practices taken from two large corpuses of family meals in Scotland and preschool lunches in Sweden. Discursive Psychology was used to explicate the ways in which categories of food likes and dislikes are implicated in social actions during mealtimes, such as offering food, encouraging children to eat, or responding to food already eaten. The analysis unpacks the central argument in three parts: (1) that discursive practices construct psychological categories, (2) that categories are embedded within social actions, and (3) that social actions may change, but the categories stick. The paper contributes to discursive and interactional work on the use of categories through shifting the analytical gaze to dispositional categories and examining mundane (as well as institutional) settings. The implications of this work extend to a much broader field of research on language and behavior change through illustrating the embedded resistance of certain discursive categories and their consequences for the possibilities for change.

Diskursiv psykologi är en teoretisk ansats och en analytisk metod för att undersöka hur psykologiska begrepp är konstruerade i samtal, och konsekvenserna av dessa konstruktioner för social interaktion. Vissa kallar ansatsen diskurspsykologi, men det vanligaste och det som stämmer bäst överens med ursprungsbetydelsen är diskursiv psykologi. Ansatser kan användas på video- och ljudinspelningar och på skriven text. Den är användbar när man har särskilda psykologiska spörsmål som man vill utforska i social interaktion.

Play has long been understood as an important pedagogical practice, particularly in early childhood education and care settings. Playing with food, however, has typically been overlooked, and very little is known about food play during mealtimes. The apparent dichotomy between rule-following and playfulness at mealtimes has led to a paucity of research on playing while eating. This paper raises the profile of food play and examines instances in which young children initiate pretend play with their food during shared mealtimes. Data are taken from a large corpus of video-recorded lunches in Swedish preschools, and episodes featuring pretend play with food were analysed using multimodal interaction analysis. The results illustrate how play signalling is multimodally achieved, directed first to teachers, often involves other children, and enables the multiactivity of playing and eating. Children invited teachers into their imaginary worlds and teacher’s responses enabled the play narrative to develop and co-exist with the institutional demands of eating lunch together. The paper provides empirical evidence that pretend play with food during meals offers affordances for generating and sharing imaginary worlds with teachers and peers.

Repetition has often been argued to be a semiotic device that iconically signifies 'more content', such as intensity and plurality. However, through multimodal interaction analysis of materials in English, Estonian, and Swedish, this paper demonstrates how self-repetition is used to coordinate actions across participants and temporally organize the ongoing activity. The data are taken from infant mealtimes, pilates classes, dance training, boardgames, rock climbing, and opera rehearsals. Repetition of both lexical and non-lexical tokens can prolong, postpone, and generally organize segments of action as well as co-create rhythms and moves in a moment-by-moment reflexive relationship with other (non-vocalizing) participants. A crucial feature of repetitions is that they can be flexibly extended to fit the other's public performance, its launching, continuation, and projectable completion. We argue that the iconicity of repetition emerges through its indexical relationship to other bodies, as a real-time jointly achieved phenomenon.

Collaboration across professional boundaries is an essential aspect of health care, and interprofessional education (IPE) is a common way to help increase students collaborative abilities. Research on how and when IPE should be arranged in a curriculum remains, however, inconclusive. How students actually develop interprofessional competencies have been difficult to demonstrate and is still an under-researched area. Studying IPE in context is therefore important to understand its full complexity. This paper examines how students work with scenarios from professional health care contexts when learning together in interprofessional problem-based learning tutorials during the first year of undergraduate education. The data are video-recorded tutorials of students from medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology, and physiotherapy programmes. The analysis focuses on students discussing their readings of the literature. Drawing on "Communities of Practice," findings show that students discuss and connect professional knowledge, with "brokers" (the tutors) and "boundary objects" (scenarios) supporting the emergence of students professional knowledge. The scenarios, as boundary objects, also enabled the students to turn into brokers themselves. The paper contributes to research on interprofessional learning and offers support for implementing IPE in the early stages of undergraduate education.