Post-constructionist social psychology arises as a reflexive critique of the once-radical but now increasingly institutionalised social constructionist movement, exposing its drift toward orthodoxy while renewing its critical ethos by embracing epistemic multiplicity, material performativity, and reflexive knowledge production. This perspective interrogates how constructionism, once marginal and rebellious, now risks becoming a mainstream academic comfort zone, diluted by institutional assimilation and stripped of its initial insurgent force. Íñiguez suggests that a revitalised critical psychology must go beyond the linguistic idealism of early constructionism to engage with material, performative, and intersectional complexities, incorporating insights from feminist epistemologies, Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and queer theory. The post-constructionist stance thus repositions knowledge as an entangled, situated, and performative process shaped by historical, cultural, and bodily contingencies. Concepts like reflexivity, historicisation of knowledge, and interpretative agency are foregrounded to resist reductive binaries such as subject/object or social/natural. In particular, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity expands the conceptual terrain by asserting that identities are not merely discursively constructed but materially iterated, thereby bridging the gap between discourse and embodiment. ANT, meanwhile, critiques the social essentialism of constructionism by proposing a hybrid ontology in which human and non-human actors co-produce the social world. Feminist epistemology, drawing on Haraway and Keller, further destabilises claims to neutrality and universality in science, arguing for situated knowledge that is accountable to power, gender, and positionality. Ultimately, this post-constructionist landscape is less a paradigm shift than a distributed mesh of theoretical interventions that demand a renewed, politically engaged, and methodologically plural social psychology attuned to the dissonances of contemporary knowledge production.
Íñiguez, L. (2005) Nuevos debates, nuevas ideas y nuevas prácticas en la psicología social de la era ‘post-construccionista’. Athenea Digital, 8.
