Social and developmental psychology are often viewed as distinct subdisciplines, each with its own theories and methodologies. However, this book seeks to bridge that divide by proposing an integrative framework that considers various levels of analysis, from the individual to the societal. It emphasizes the interplay of fundamental concepts such as intra- and inter-group conflict and change across these levels. By revisiting and renewing foundational theories of development, the book intr...

Jaan Valsiner has made numerous contributions to the development of psychology over the last 40 years. He is internationally recognized as a leader and innovator within both developmental psychology and cultural psychology, and has received numerous prizes for his work: the Alexander von Humboldt prize, the Hans Killian prize, and the Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association. Having taught at Universities in Europe, Asia and north and south A...

Liminality has become a key concept within the social sciences, with a growing number of publications devoted to it in recent years. The concept is needed to address those aspects of human experience and social life that fall outside of ordered structures. In contrast to the clearly defined roles and routines that define so much of industrial work and economic life, it highlights spaces of transition, indefiniteness, ambiguity, play and creativity. Thus, it is an indispensable concept and ...

Cultural psychology explores the mutual constitution of persons-minds and socialcultural worlds. It aims to be both transdisciplinary and international in its approach, and to develop theoretical models that remain faithful to people’s lived experiences.This volume further advances these objectives through an exploration of core concepts (especially, normativity, liminality, and resistance), cultural psychology’s foundations in philosophy, and the translation of theory into a metho...

This book takes a sociocultural, developmental and dialogical perspective to explore the constructive and interconnected nature of remembering and imagining. Conceived as cognitive-affective processes, both emerge at the border of the person and his or her socio-cultural world. Memory is approached as a functional adaption to the environment using the resources of the past in preparation for action in the present. Imagination is tightly related to memory in that both aim to escape the conf...

This volume discusses the interface between human development and socio-cultural processes by exploring the writings of Gerard Duveen, an internationally renowned figure, whose untimely death left a void in the fields of socio-developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and research into social representations. Duveen's original and comprehensiv

Since 2011 the world has experienced an explosion of popular uprisings that began in the Middle East and quickly spread to other regions. What are the different social-psychological conditions for these events to emerge, what different trajectories do they take, and how are they are represented to the public? To answer these questions, this book applies the latest social psychological theories to contextualized cases of revolutions and uprisings from the eighteenth to the twenty-first cent...

This book explores how street art has been used as a tool of resistance to express opposition to political systems and social issues around the world. Aesthetic devices such as murals, tags, posters, street performances and caricatures are discussed in terms of how they are employed to occupy urban spaces and present alternative visions of social reality. Based on empirical research, the authors use the framework of creative psychology to explore the aesthetic dimensions of resistance that...

Venturing out of the laboratory into the wild of natural settings, it becomes untenable to locate memory strictly in the head. Instead, memory appears as a materially extended and socially distributed process, embedded within culture and history. This book explores the complex relations between practices of remembering and the settings in which they are enacted. It advances a novel set of concepts developed from ecological, cognitive, cultural and narrative currents in psychology and furth...

This book brings together social sciencists to create an interdisciplinary dialogue on the topic of social change as a cultural process. Culture is as much about novelty as it is about tradition, as much about change as it is about stability. This dynamic tension is analyzed in collective protests, intergroup dynamics, language, mass media, science, community participation, art, and social transitions to capitalism, among others contexts. These diverse cases illustrate a number of key fact...

The Constructive Mind is an integrative study of the psychologist Frederic Bartlett's (1886–1969) life, work and legacy. Bartlett is most famous for the idea that remembering is constructive and for the concept of schema; for him, 'constructive' meant that human beings are future-oriented and flexibly adaptive to new circumstances. This book shows how his notion of construction is also central to understanding social psychology and cultural dynamics, as well as other psychological processe...

This brief charts out principles for a cultural psychology of remembering. The idea at its core is a conceptualization of remembering as a constructive process--something that occurs at the intersection of a person and their social-cultural world. To do this, it moves away from the traditional metaphor of memory as storage and develops the alternative metaphor of construction as part of wider social and cultural developments in society. This new approach is developed from key ideas of Lev ...