T Zittoun
Biographic Data
| ID | 10966 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Zittoun |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Zittoun |
| SIGNATURE | ZITTOUN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Neuchâtel |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3203-2819 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 261 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 79 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Analysing films to rethink the psychology of time
This paper contributes to social and cultural psychology by means of a systematic reflection on the notion of time in its togetherness with space as revealed by films. It presents a new theorisation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’ by distinguishing created, creating, and creative types which exist in dynamic relations of mutual presupposition. This new theorisation is then used to guide the thematic decomposition of five films di…
Methodological and Theoretical Integration
Developmental science is a fragmented field underpinned by fragmented methods and fragmented data. Quantitative and qualitative approaches advance siloed theories based on siloed methods and data. We argue that analysing longitudinal big qualitative data can provide a platform for theoretical integration through methodological integration. We illustrate this with research on naturally occurring diaries spanning decades and comprising millions of …
Conflict and Change
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 foundat…
Moving to a “flat with referee” in older age
Moving in older age is a critical experience in the person’s life trajectory as it may require an important reorganization of their relation to the social and material environment. In order to better understand this experience, we propose to address it drawing on the concepts of rupture and transition as developed in the frame of sociocultural lifecourse psychology. We complete this theoretical framework with the distinction between frame and spa…
Beyond narratives of decline versus success
Retirement is rarely conceptualised in terms of learning and development. However, as the end of professional activity approaches, many people begin to reflect deeply on the past, present, and future of their lives. This potentially profound reflection involves a complex process of learning and development to which research has paid too little attention. This article places the voice of a retiree at the centre of the study and provides a nuanced …
Resonating Crises
Crises have usually been considered temporary states of exception, but research is increasingly exploring slower, less visible, and more chronic crises, acknowledging that they differ in their characteristics and experiences. Echoing these shifts, we explore how crises and ruptures resonate through time. Using natural language processing and conventional qualitative methodologies to analyse diaries written over more than two decades, we noticed t…
A New Housing Mode in a Regional Landscape of Care
The study of ageing, which received growing attention over the past 30 years, has progressively realised the importance of the cultural, historical, and socio-economical environment for the various courses of ageing. However, we believe that it could be further conceptualised. First, we propose to enrich it through the notion of “landscape of care” developed by geography. Second, the distinction developed by sociocultural psychologists between so…
Designing landscapes of affordances for ageing in place
This paper aims to contribute theoretically, methodologically, and empirically to research and interventions regarding ageing in place. Theoretically, the paper contributes by drawing on the literature on landscapes of care and landscapes of affordances to suggest a multiscalar and more-than-human approach to ageing in place. Methodologically, we argue that studying ageing in place requires a participatory and translational methodology. Participa…
In memoriam Ivana Marková (1938–2024)
A powerful voice in our community faded out on December 1st, 2024. It is with deep sadness that we acknowledge the death of Professor Ivana Marková, aged 86. Ivana Marková developed an unique, inspiring, dialogical perspective in social and cultural psychology; she saw dialogism as an ontology, an epistemology and ethics. She also lived dialogism: a life of rich long-term dialogues with so many friends and colleagues all over the world. Ivana Mar…
Ruptures as Imagined and Theorized
What is the relationship between our theories of rupture (which view it as a basis for learning and development) and narratives of rupture (myths, novels, films, etc.)? On the one hand there are striking convergences. Both entail a variant of the following sequence: steady state, breach, crisis, and resolution or transformation. But, on the other hand, there are important differences. Narratives are multi-functional: they allow us to approach our…
Crisis and Human Development
Crises are everywhere – from environmental collapses, wars, and skyrocketing inequalities to ageing populations and pandemics, yet there is no universal way that individuals respond to these. What can be said about these? This is an invitation for us, loosely defined as social, cultural and developmental psychologists, to stop and think : we emphasise the role crises play in human and cultural development. Our starting point is that, to consider …
Theorising Human Development in Adult Life
Although it is well established that human development is a lifecourse process, little is still known about development in the adult years. Few attempts have been made to develop integrative understandings of what people learn across various domains, such as work, hobbies and family. Also, adult life is addressed theoretically and empirically usually only on short life periods or through retrospective interviews. In this paper we propose a theore…
Notes from Self-Isolation
The Covid-19 pandemic brought about an unprecedented global health crisis, which caused a seismic disruption of people’s lives, their habitual practices, systems of meanings, and relationship to the past and the future. This contribution will explore how a group of 17 participants who wrote a collective diary during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Slovenia (March–May 2020) experienced the crisis as a personal and collective rupture, an…
Psychology of Change
This interview is a slightly modified transcript from the second Psyche Talk, hosted at the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, February 15, 2024. Psyche Talks are hosted as biannual events, where prominent psychological researchers are invited to discuss fundamental questions about the nature and subject matter of psychology through an interview-based format. The focus of this interview is on how people make sense o…
Thematic engagements
In this paper, we propose a sociocultural perspective to consider affects in older age. The psychology of learning throughout the whole life course, including in the life of older adults, suggest that affects play an important role. However, developmental psychology has paid little attention to affects in learning and development, and even less to these aspects in older age. We believe that it is important to examine affects in older age because …
Development and vulnerability across the lifecourse
What is it that develops in adult life? Development through work and family life have been documented and theorised in detail, but much less is known about what is learned beyond these domains, through people’s engagements in hobbies or when out of work (e.g., unemployed, retired). We argue that adult development can be addressed in general terms, beyond domain specificity; drawing on our sociocultural psychology framework, and assuming an open-s…
Multi-Resolution Design
A recent challenge is how to mix qualitative interpretation with computational techniques to analyze big qualitative data. To this end, we propose “multi-resolution design” for mixed method analysis of the same data : qualitative analysis zooms-in to provide in-depth contextual insight and quantitative analysis zooms-out to provide measures, associations, and statistical models. The raw qualitative data is transformed between excerpts, counts, an…
Diaries as Technologies for Sense-making and Self-transformation in Times of Vulnerability
Diaries have been generally understood as “windows” on sense-making processes when studying life ruptures. In this article, we draw on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of self-writing as a “technology of the self” and on sociocultural psychology to propose that diaries are not “windows” but technologies that aid in the sense-making. Concretely, we analyzed three non-exhaustive and non-exclusive uses of diary writing in times of vulnerability: …
What Is the Nexus between Migration and Mobility? A Framework to Understand the Interplay between Different Ideal Types of Human Movement
Categorising certain forms of human movement as 'migration' and others as 'mobility' has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration-mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility:…
La collaboration, enjeu d’une réforme de politique cantonale du vieillissement
Confronté au changement démographique, le canton de Neuchâtel (Suisse) lance en 2012 une réforme socio-sanitaire visant à développer les possibilités de vieillissement à domicile. Accompagnée d’une reconfiguration importante du réseau de soins, d’aide et d’accompagnement des personnes âgées, cette réforme requiert la collaboration entre personnes et institutions impliquées. Mais en quoi consiste exactement cette collaboration, sur quels objets po…
Integrative Perspectives on Human Development
Werner Greve argues for an abstract and integrative theory of development; to progress toward such a theory, he suggests that evolutionary psychology can provide concepts for a processual approach to adaptation. To complement this perspective, I propose to start where the author finishes: the need to further qualify change, and to account for information. Considering ruptures and sense-making as cornerstones of a developmental approach, I recall …
Places and mobilities
This interdisciplinary special issue brings mobility scholars and migration scholars together to examine how places and mobilities are entangled. It asks whether using place as an entry point for studying human movements can reveal new insights into our understanding and conceptualisation of mobility. In this introduction we demonstrate, based on the contributions gathered in this special issue, how using place as an entry point for studying mobi…
Encore et toujours, imaginer malgré tout
Zittoun Tania. Encore et toujours, imaginer malgré tout. In: Diplômées, n°280-281, 2022. Futurs possibles. pp. 93-102
Welcoming mobile children at school
Switzerland, like other countries in Europe, has long depended on migration and mobility for its economy. Facilitating the integration of migrant children in school, primarily through the acquisition of the local language, has therefore been a priority for policymakers. In recent years, mobility has been on the increase and mobility trajectories have become more diverse. A growing percentage of families arriving in the country have experienced re…
Learning and developing over the life-course
This article introduces the special issue “Learning and Developing over the Life-Course: A Sociocultural Approach”, which collects six papers stemming from the project “Ages for Learning and Growth: Sociocultural Perspectives” (AGILE), supported by the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction. Considering that sociocultural psychology has mainly focused on development and learning in children, adolescents or (young) adults, A…
The Use of Symbolic Resources in Developmental Transitions
This paper introduces the idea of symbolic resources as the use of cultural elements to mediate the representational work occasioned by ruptures or discontinuities in the smooth experience of ordinary life, moments when the 'taken-for-granted' meanings cease to be taken for granted. In particular we are concerned with the use of symbolic resources in moments of developmental transitions, that is, the mobilization of symbolic elements ranging from…
Imagination as Expansion of Experience
Modalities of Generalization Through Single Case Studies
Symbolic resources and responsibility in transitions
Since youth transitions have been redefined as flexible periods of change, it becomes difficult to conceptually distinguish them from any other transition period in people's life. Transitions are here defined as involving three types of interdependent processes (social relocation, knowledge construction and meaning-making). From a cultural psychological perspective, youth transitions can be qualified by young people's access to symbolic responsib…
Conflicting community commitments
Recent developments of the concept of “sense of community” have highlighted the multiplicity of people's senses of community. In this article, the authors introduce the theory of the dialogical self as a means of theorizing the conflicts that can arise between a person's commitments to multiple communities. They ask the question, “When faced with conflicting community commitments, how does a person decide where his or her allegiances lie?” The co…
Symbolic Competencies for Developmental Transitions
Human life consists of stability interspersed with ruptures. Transitions that follow such ruptures, offer a window on processes of change at the level of skill acquisition, identities, but also meaning construction. The article explores various uses of cultural elements such as books, movies or religious baggage as symbolic resources for such psychological development. It introduces the notion of interiority to have access to the work of these sy…
Fragmentation or Differentiation
Religion in Meaning Making and Boundary Work
Places and mobilities
This interdisciplinary special issue brings mobility scholars and migration scholars together to examine how places and mobilities are entangled. It asks whether using place as an entry point for studying human movements can reveal new insights into our understanding and conceptualisation of mobility. In this introduction we demonstrate, based on the contributions gathered in this special issue, how using place as an entry point for studying mobi…
A sociocultural approach to mobile families
This paper proposes a sociocultural perspective of mobility, of which migration is only one case, with a focus on mobile families. Consistent with mobility studies, sociocultural psychology of the lifecourse proposes to study both the sociocultural conditions of mobility, and the perspective of mobile people. In addition, in this article, we consider interrelated lives in mobility. We discuss the specific case of one family documented as part of …
I Have Been Born, Raised and Lived My Whole Life Here” – Perpetually on the Move While Remaining Still
This article explores the story of Einar, a Faroese man who always lived within a 500-meters radius on the island of Suðuroy, who never felt “stuck” or “immobile” in the literal sense of the word. Studies have shown that staying is a process, as much as mobility; yet while mobility studies mainly show that imagination is an incentive to move, we argue that imagination may also actively support staying. Combining sociocultural psychology with mobi…
Collaborative Research, Knowledge and Emergence
On the Emergence of the Subject
What Is the Nexus between Migration and Mobility? A Framework to Understand the Interplay between Different Ideal Types of Human Movement
Categorising certain forms of human movement as 'migration' and others as 'mobility' has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration-mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility:…
Religion as Dialogical Resource
Reproducibility in Psychology
Thinking with the Rain. The Trajectory of a Metaphor in Vygotsky’s Theoretical Development
Vygotsky’s Notebooks edited by Zavershneva and Van der Veer (2018) give us a unique access to the inner-dialogue in which Vygotsky engaged while he was developing his theoretical work. In this paper, I propose to follow as “fil rouge” the semantic field associated to water, rain and clouds, and that will culminate as a “meteorological metaphor” through the Notebooks. Following the trajectory of this metaphor enables me to retrace the development …
Les transitions professionnelles
Les transitions professionnelles jalonnent les parcours de vie des personnes. Nous proposons de considérer trois dynamiques que ces transitions impliquent : les remaniements identitaires, l’acquisition de compétences, la construction de sens. Les personnes peuvent trouver différentes ressources pour aménager des transitions. Dans le contexte socioprofessionnel actuel, le rôle des conseillers en orientation est souvent d’accompagner ces processus …
Meaning and Change in Psychotherapy
Memorials and Semiotic Dynamics
Multi-Resolution Design
A recent challenge is how to mix qualitative interpretation with computational techniques to analyze big qualitative data. To this end, we propose “multi-resolution design” for mixed method analysis of the same data : qualitative analysis zooms-in to provide in-depth contextual insight and quantitative analysis zooms-out to provide measures, associations, and statistical models. The raw qualitative data is transformed between excerpts, counts, an…
Diaries as Technologies for Sense-making and Self-transformation in Times of Vulnerability
Diaries have been generally understood as “windows” on sense-making processes when studying life ruptures. In this article, we draw on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of self-writing as a “technology of the self” and on sociocultural psychology to propose that diaries are not “windows” but technologies that aid in the sense-making. Concretely, we analyzed three non-exhaustive and non-exclusive uses of diary writing in times of vulnerability: …
The Embodied Dimension of Imagination. Expanding the Loop Model
In memoriam Ivana Marková (1938–2024)
A powerful voice in our community faded out on December 1st, 2024. It is with deep sadness that we acknowledge the death of Professor Ivana Marková, aged 86. Ivana Marková developed an unique, inspiring, dialogical perspective in social and cultural psychology; she saw dialogism as an ontology, an epistemology and ethics. She also lived dialogism: a life of rich long-term dialogues with so many friends and colleagues all over the world. Ivana Mar…
Integrative Perspectives on Human Development
Werner Greve argues for an abstract and integrative theory of development; to progress toward such a theory, he suggests that evolutionary psychology can provide concepts for a processual approach to adaptation. To complement this perspective, I propose to start where the author finishes: the need to further qualify change, and to account for information. Considering ruptures and sense-making as cornerstones of a developmental approach, I recall …
The Social Dynamics of Social Science Research
This paper considers the semiotic organization of the research process in the social sciences. It offers a detailed analysis of the semiotic organization of a much used technique in the social sciences: the one-on-one non-directive interview. We consider how different signs might constrain the researcher’s thoughts and actions within the ongoing processes of interview dialogue. We are especially interested in different semiotic representations th…
The Use of Symbolic Resources in Developmental Transitions
This paper introduces the idea of symbolic resources as the use of cultural elements to mediate the representational work occasioned by ruptures or discontinuities in the smooth experience of ordinary life, moments when the 'taken-for-granted' meanings cease to be taken for granted. In particular we are concerned with the use of symbolic resources in moments of developmental transitions, that is, the mobilization of symbolic elements ranging from…
The Hidden Work of Symbolic Resources in Emotions
Memorials and Semiotic Dynamics
Symbolic Competencies for Developmental Transitions
Human life consists of stability interspersed with ruptures. Transitions that follow such ruptures, offer a window on processes of change at the level of skill acquisition, identities, but also meaning construction. The article explores various uses of cultural elements such as books, movies or religious baggage as symbolic resources for such psychological development. It introduces the notion of interiority to have access to the work of these sy…
Difficult secularity
Religious systems are organised semiotic structures providing people with values and rules, identities, regularity, and meaning. Consequently, a person moving out of a religious system might be exposed to meaning-ruptures. The paper presents the situation of young people who have been in Yeshiva, a rabbinic high-school, and who have to join secular university life. It analyses the changes to which they are exposed. On the bases of this case study…
The Metaphor of the Triangle in Theories of Human Development
Developmental psychologists have a long history of using triangle metaphors to conceptualise the social constitution of psychological development. In this paper, we present a genealogy of triadic theories, to clarify their origins, distinctions between them, and to identify key themes for theoretical development. The analysis identifies three core triangle models in the developmental literature. Each theory relies on some combination of the terms…
Symbolic resources and responsibility in transitions
Since youth transitions have been redefined as flexible periods of change, it becomes difficult to conceptually distinguish them from any other transition period in people's life. Transitions are here defined as involving three types of interdependent processes (social relocation, knowledge construction and meaning-making). From a cultural psychological perspective, youth transitions can be qualified by young people's access to symbolic responsib…
Collaborative Research, Knowledge and Emergence
Quando a cultura é considerada nas pesquisas em psicologia do desenvolvimento
O estudo da "cultura" remete às relações entre "significações coletivas" e "sentido pessoal" do conhecimento e da atividade. Identificamos quatro correntes recentes de pesquisa que têm abordado essas questões, examinamos suas escolhas teóricas e metodológicas, e realçamos pontos importantes para pesquisas futuras
Commentary
Cubero, de la Mata and Cubero show that women who have attended some formal adult education are able to solve a task in a manner that suggests that they master conceptual thinking more than do women just starting such education. I suggest that this interpretation is based on models of learning that do not fully take into account the person actively engaged in making sense of the situation. Focusing on three theoretical issues—the language—thinkin…
Conflicting community commitments
Recent developments of the concept of “sense of community” have highlighted the multiplicity of people's senses of community. In this article, the authors introduce the theory of the dialogical self as a means of theorizing the conflicts that can arise between a person's commitments to multiple communities. They ask the question, “When faced with conflicting community commitments, how does a person decide where his or her allegiances lie?” The co…
La musique pour changer la vie. Usages de connaissances, dynamiques de reconnaissance
Les personnes participent à une très grande variété de situations sociales qui les exposent à des discours, des personnes ou des objets culturels qui leur paraissent inconnus. Que ces situations soient formellement constituées comme éducatives ou non, les personnes peuvent alors s’engager dans des dynamiques de construction de connaissances nouvelles, mais aussi faire usage de connaissances acquises ailleurs. L’approche socioculturelle des dynami…
Fragmentation or Differentiation
Using Resources
The idea that culture comprises resources that are used has become a popular means to re-conceptualize the culture—agency antinomy. However, the theorization of using resources is fragmented. The present article reviews several attempts to theorize resources, arguing that there has been too much focus upon the resources themselves, while the notion of use has been neglected. Focusing upon mode of use, as opposed to the resources used, the article…
Meaning and Change in Psychotherapy
The art of noise
This article explores a possible cultural psychology of sounds, or rather, constitutes a call for an inclusion of sounds as part of our analysis of people’s daily experience. The reflection is based on social sciences as well as on artists’ work on the limits of sounds. The argument is, first, that soundscapes are as much constitutive of our experience as the spatial and material components of our lived spaces. Second, sound can be considered as …
Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey. Between a Man and a Woman? Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage
Why do Christian religious organizations oppose same-sex marriage? In raising this question, Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey embarks on a journey that reveals some of the hidden logic of America's self-m
Les transitions professionnelles
Les transitions professionnelles jalonnent les parcours de vie des personnes. Nous proposons de considérer trois dynamiques que ces transitions impliquent : les remaniements identitaires, l’acquisition de compétences, la construction de sens. Les personnes peuvent trouver différentes ressources pour aménager des transitions. Dans le contexte socioprofessionnel actuel, le rôle des conseillers en orientation est souvent d’accompagner ces processus …
On the Emergence of the Subject
Human Development in the Life Course
Drawing on philosophy, the history of psychology and the natural sciences, this book proposes a new theoretical foundation for the psychology of the life course. It features the study of unique individual life courses in their social and cultural environment, combining the perspectives of developmental and sociocultural psychology, psychotherapy, learning sciences and geronto-psychology. In particular, the book highlights semiotic processes, spec…
Meaning making in motion
What is meaning? And how does it arise? Werner and Kaplan’s approach to symbol formation was prescient in understanding the importance of the body and activity. However, their embodied approach needs to be complemented by a broader conceptualization of social institutions and complex semiotic structures in the genesis and function of symbolic processes. Specifically, human bodies, which are the medium and locus of experience, are embedded in soci…
Religion in Meaning Making and Boundary Work
Imagination as Expansion of Experience
Religion as Dialogical Resource
Sociology (57 works) · Psychology (54 works) · Epistemology (44 works) · Social Representations and Identity (44 works) · Computer Science (28 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Sociocultural evolution (24 works) · Community Health and Development (18 works) · Social science (18 works)