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This book brings to cultural psychology the focus on phenomenology of everyday life. Whether it is in the context of education, work, or exploration of life environments, the chapters in this book converge on the need to give attention to complex realities of everyday living. Thus, a description of pre-school organization in Japan would be in its form very different from school organization in Britain or Colombia—yet the realities of human beings acting in social roles are continuous around the world.
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 America, he is currently Niels Bohr professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. This book is the first to discuss in detail the different sides of Valsiner’s thought, including developmental science, semiotic mediation, cultural transmission, aesthetics, globalization of science, epistemology, methodology and the history of ideas. The book provides an overview, evaluation and extension of Valsiner’s key ideas for the construction of a dynamic cultural psychology, written by his former students and colleagues from around the world.
The second volume of Annals of Cultural Psychology is dedicated to the affective nature of human social relationships with the environment. The chapters here included explore the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of the concept of affectivating originally introduced by one of us (Valsiner, 1999), as a potential tool of inquiry into the affective-sensitive dimension of psychological life within a cultural-psychological framework. The concept of affectivating involves two psychological dimensions often undervalued or even obliterated from contemporary cultural psychology, namely the affective involvement and the agentivity of people in their social encounters. Through several ex...
Memory and learning are seen as mental phenomena and generally studied as brain processes, for example, within various branches of psychology and neuroscience. This book represents a rather different tack, based on sociocultural theory, cultural psychology and dialogism. Authors from many different disciplines and countries study memory and learning as practices adopted by people in different interactional and institutional contexts. Studies range from detailed analyses of situated activities to broad sociohistorical studies of cultural phenomena and collective memories such as national narratives and physical symbols for commemorating events and traditions. By focusing on how people engage in remembering and learning, this book provides a necessary complement to currently popular neuroscientific approaches.
Making of the Future is the first English?language coverage of the new methodological perspective in cultural psychology—TEA (Trajectory Equifinality Approach) that was established in 2004 as a collaboration of Japanese and American cultural psychologists. In the decade that follows it has become a guiding approach for cultural psychology all over the World. Its central feature is the reliance on irreversible time as the basis for understanding of cultural phenomena and the consideration of real and imaginary options in human life course as relevant for the construction of personal futures. The book is expected to be of interest in researchers and practitioners in education, developmental and social psychology, developmental sociology and history. It has extensions for research methodology in the focus on different sampling strategies.
"Contemporary mainstream psychology has moved toward methodological specificity bounded by instrumental experimentalism. However, this institutional reduction of sanctioned methods has not been fully embraced by all social scientists, nor even by all experimental psychologists. The social sciences are rife with examples of practicing empirical scientists disaffected with the reductionism and atomism of traditional experimentalism.The empirical theory and practice of four of these disaffected social scientists--Lev Vygotsky, James Baldwin, James Gibson, and Kurt Lewin--is explored in this volume. Each of the scientists considered here argued for a rigorously empirical method while still maint...
Putting subjectivity back in psychology and in social sciences is the aim of this volume. Subjectivity is a core psychological dimension but frequently forgotten. Without a full understanding of the uniqueness of each human life our understanding of psychological life fails to reach its aim. This book explores precisely the field of subjectivity, offering the reader different and innovative views on this challenging theme. This book is an asset for all those interested in understanding how the mind operates as a subjectifying process and how this subjectifying mind is simultaneously the product and the content of feeling an unique and unrepeatable subjective life. By bringing together renown...
This book offers a new approach to imagination which brings its emotional, social, cultural, contextual and existential characteristics to the fore. Fantasy and imagination are understood as the human capacity to distance oneself from the here?and?now situation in order to return to it with new possibilities. To do this we use social?cultural means (e.g. language, stories, art, images, etc.) to conceive of imaginary scenarios, some of which may become real. Imagination is involved in every situation of our lives, though to different degrees. Sometimes this process can lead to concrete products (e.g., artistic works) that can be picked up and used by others for the purposes of their imagining...
This book presents an integrative perspective on home or Heimat showing that it is much more than the place we were born or where we live. This book brings fresh theoretical and empirical perspectives on what home is and can be from different viewpoints. The chapters invite the reader to face challenging questions of what we learn about Heimat, when it is taken from us, threatened, left on purpose or when we set out on the journey to find one. The chapters are written by psychologists throughout, but are expanded in perspective by comments from the groups of people featured in the chapters, who are thus given their own voice. The book concludes with a suggestion on how to unite all the diffe...
Pilgrimage in Practice: Narration, Reclamation and Healing provides an interdisciplinary approach to the topic. It reveals many aspects of the practice of pilgrimage, from its nationalistic facets to its effect on economic development; from the impact of the internet to questions of globalization; from pilgrimage as protest to pilgrimage as creative expression in such media as film, art and literature. Perhaps best understood as a form of heritage tourism or tourism with a conscience, pilgrimage (as with touristic travel) contains a measure of transformation that is often deep and enduring, making it a fascinating area of study. Reviewing social justice in the context of pilgrimage and featuring a diverse collection of interdisciplinary voices from across the globe, this book is a rich collection of papers for researchers of pilgrimage and religious and heritage tourism.