A Gillespie
Biographic Data
| ID | 13581 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Gillespie |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Gillespie |
| SIGNATURE | GILLESPIE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0162-1269 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 469 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Provoking interpretation: Using large language models as devil’s advocates.
Although counterarguments can improve our interpretations, they are usually superficial or absent. I propose using large language models to role-play devil’s advocate and criticize interpretations from perspectives that challenge our own positionality. Drawing on Bakhtin’s dialogism, I conceptualize large language models as multivoiced statistical representations that can ventriloquize diverse counterarguments. I illustrate these “digital devils”…
The looping effects of psychological theories: From anomaly to opportunity
Looping effects were introduced by philosopher Ian Hacking to refer to the two-way interactive relationship between scientific classifications and the people classified. This article extends the concept beyond classification to consider how psychological theories shape and transform their phenomena through looping effects, rather than merely mirroring them. These effects have been conceptualized as destabilizing, problematic, and anomalous. In co…
Methodological and Theoretical Integration: Multi-Resolution Research of Multi-Decade Diaries
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 …
Dialogical Intersubjectivity: How Turn-Taking Scaffolds Perspective-Taking
Intersubjectivity, the coordination of people’s beliefs and actions, is central to human psychology and society. However, a legacy of Cartesian dualism has fragmented research along two dimensions (psychological vs. interpersonal; structural vs. interactional). This fragmentation obscures how the psychological and interpersonal aspects of intersubjectivity mutually reinforce one another. I argue that, despite epistemological differences, these li…
Conflict and Change: Integrating Social and Developmental Psychology
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…
The Ecological Assessment of Responses to Speaking-up tool—development and reliability testing of a method for coding safety listening behavior in naturalistic conversations
Introduction Safety communication is crucial for accident aversion across industries. While researchers often focus on encouraging concern-raising (‘safety voice’), responses to these concerns (‘safety listening’) remain underexplored. Existing studies primarily use self-report measures; however, these tend to focus on perceptions of listening rather than behaviors. To fully understand and examine how safety listening is enacted and influential i…
Beyond narratives of decline versus success: Retirement through the lens of a diary
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 …
Cultural Capture Among Regulators: A Systematic Review
In established democracies, the threat of regulatory capture—often implicated in major crises—is usually less about financial mechanisms like bribery and more about the subtle social processes of cultural capture. But how exactly is cultural capture defined, theorized, and assessed, and what are its underlying mechanisms, manifestations, and impact? This article presents a systematic review ( n = 39) of cultural capture, identifying 7 description…
From Play Date to Stress Fate: Juvenile Social Play Rescues Stress‐Induced Changes in Adult Social Behavior
Long‐term effects of social play on neural and behavioral development remain unclear. We investigated whether just 1 h of juvenile social play could rescue the effects of play deprivation on stress‐related behavior and markers of neural plasticity. Syrian hamsters were reared from postnatal days 21–43 in three conditions: peer isolation, peer isolation with daily social play sessions (dyadic play), or group‐housed with littermates. In adulthood, …
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: Symbolic Resources for Dealing With the Unexpected
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…
Theorising Human Development in Adult Life: A Complex, Multidimensional, Dynamic, Situated Model
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…
Challenges for conceptualising otherness
Otherness is a deceptively simple concept. Ostensibly it refers to someone else, who is, in an ultimate sense, unknowable. But, there are many ways in which the self-other boundary is blurred. First, self is already other from the standpoint of the other. Second, in so far as perspective taking is possible, there is some otherness within the self, and some self within the other. Third, when people talk and think they routinely move between the pe…
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: Using Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses to Recursively Zoom in and out of the Same Dataset
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: …
Textual Indicators of Deliberative Dialogue: A Systematic Review of Methods for Studying the Quality of Online Dialogues
High-quality online dialogues help sustain democracy. Deliberative theory, which predates the internet, provides the primary model for assessing the quality of online dialogues. It conceptualizes high-quality online dialogue as civil, rational, constructive, equal, interactive, and for the common good. More recently, advances in computation have driven an upsurge of empirical studies using automated methods for operationalizing online dialogue an…
Developing a battery of measures for unobtrusive indicators of organisational culture: A research note
Measuring organisational culture is important for detecting the values and practices that increase organisational risk (e.g., unethical conduct). Self-report methods (e.g., surveys) are mostly used to study culture: however, due to reporting biases and sampling limitations, and the rapid advance of digital data, researchers have proposed unobtrusive indicators of culture (UICs; e.g., drawn from social media, company reports, executive data) as a …
Metaphors of development and the development of metaphors
Development is a core theoretical issue for psychology. Yet, the root metaphors that guide theory and research on development have rarely been questioned, and the limitations and blind spots of these metaphors have not been made explicit. In this article, we propose an exercise in theoretical imagination. We start by reviewing the metaphors commonly used in developmental psychology. We then develop four alternative metaphors that, despite being p…
Reproducibility in Psychology: Theoretical Distinction of Different Types of Replications
Imagining the Self Through Cultural Technologies
The aim of this chapter is to understand how the imagination of the self is mediated by cultural technologies, showing how major new inventions (such as language, writing, digitization) qualitatively change the ways in which we imagine ourselves. First, the authors look at how technology can support cognition in general and imagination specifically, examining traditional technologies such as narrative (stories, novels, and films), which have long…
Against the Odds: Syringe Exchange Policy Implementation in Indiana
Translating and Transforming Care: People With Brain Injury and Caregivers Filling In a Disability Claim Form
This article examines how the Disability Living Allowance claim form, used in the United Kingdom to allocate £13 billion of disability benefits, translates and transforms disability and care. Twenty-two people with acquired brain injury and their main informal caregivers ( n = 44) were video-recorded filling in the disability claim form. Participants disagreed on 26% of the questions, revealing two types of problems. Translation problems arose as…
Internalization: How culture becomes mind
Internalization, the process by which culture becomes mind, is a core concept in cultural psychology. However, since the 1990s it has also been the source of debate. Critiques have focused on the underlying metaphor of internal-external as problematic. It has been proposed that appropriation provides a better conceptualization, a term that focuses attention more on behavior and less on psychological processes. The present article reviews the deba…
Routine HIV Testing in Indiana Community Health Centers
Objectives. We assessed routine HIV testing in Indiana community health centers (CHCs). Methods. CHC medical directors reported HIV services, testing behaviors, barriers, and health center characteristics via survey from April to May 2013. Standard of care testing was measured by the extent to which CHCs complied with national guidelines for routine HIV testing in clinical settings. Results. Most (85.7%) CHCs reported HIV testing, primarily at pa…
Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis
Intersubjectivity refers to the variety of possible relations between perspectives. It is indispensable for understanding human social behaviour. While theoretical work on intersubjectivity is relatively sophisticated, methodological approaches to studying intersubjectivity lag behind. Most methodologies assume that individuals are the unit of analysis. In order to research intersubjectivity, however, methodologies are needed that take relationsh…
Social Representations, Alternative Representations and Semantic Barriers
Social representations research has tended to focus upon the representations that groups have in relation to some object. The present article elaborates the concept of social representations by pointing to the existence of “alternative representations” as sub‐components within social representations. Alternative representations are the ideas and images the group has about how other groups represent the given object. Alternative representations ar…
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…
A Pragmatist Approach to the Problem of Knowledge in Health Psychology
The multiplicity of forms of health-related knowledge, including biomedical knowledge, lay knowledge and critical constructionist knowledge, raises challenges for health researchers. On one hand, there is a demand for a pluralist acceptance of the variety of health-related knowledge. On the other, the need to improve health calls for action, and thus for choices between opposing forms of knowledge. The present article proposes a pragmatist approa…
Tourist Photography and the Reverse Gaze
The interaction between tourist photographer and local photographee is a dynamic site of identity construction. To date, this interaction has been theorized mainly in terms of the power of the tourist photographer, which has been shown to mediate and commodify local cultures and create new identities amongst those photographed. The present article contributes a change of emphasis by examining the sociopsychological dynamics of the reverse gaze an…
A qualitative method for analysing multivoicedness
Multivoicedness' and the 'multivoiced Self' have become important theoretical concepts guiding research. Drawing on the tradition of dialogism, the Self is conceptualised as being constituted by a multiplicity of dynamic, interacting voices. Despite the growth in literature and empirical research, there remains a paucity of established methodological tools for analysing the multivoiced Self using qualitative data. In this article, we set out a sy…
G.H. Mead: Theorist of the Social Act
There have been many readings of Mead's work, and this paper proposes yet another: Mead, theorist of the social act. It is argued that Mead's core theory of the social act has been neglected, and that without this theory, the concept of taking the attitude of the other is inexplicable and the contemporary relevance of the concept of the significant symbol is obfuscated. The paper traces the development of the social act out of Dewey's theory of t…
Conflicting community commitments: A dialogical analysis of a British woman's World War II diaries
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…
Insights from Societal Psychology: The Contextual Politics of Change
In this paper we demonstrate that societal psychology makes a unique contribution to the study of change through its focus on the 'contextual politics' of change, examining the different interests at stake within any social context. Societal psychology explores the contexts which promote or inhibit social and societal change and can be seen as a bridge between social and political psychology. It focuses on how the context shapes the ways in which…
The caregiving bind: Concealing the demands of informal care can undermine the caregiving identity
Disagreements and misunderstandings between informal caregivers and care-receivers have been widely reported, but the causes are unclear. The present article compares the views of people with acquired brain injury and their main informal caregivers (28 dyads, n = 56). First, we report a quantitative analysis finding that the majority of disagreements were about caregivers' identity. Caregivers saw themselves as less confident, less intelligent, m…
Dialogue: Bridging Personal, Community, and Social Transformation
The concept and practice of dialogue has underpinned key developments in humanistic psychotherapy and counseling. However, dialogue has also been adopted by, and incorporated into, a range of educational, community and social theories and practices, and in this sense forms a valuable bridge between humanistic psychology and the wider field of sociopolitical theory and activity. This article critically reviews how the concept of dialogue has been …
Fragmentation or Differentiation: Questioning the Crisis in Psychology
Malcolm X and His Autobiography: Identity Development and Self-narration
This paper takes up Tappan's (2005) project of analyzing the identity development of Malcolm X. Considering Malcolm X's autobiography as an instance of mediated action, I show how he uses the mediational tool of 'development as metamorphosis' to narrate himself. Because of the similarity between this mediational tool and Tappan's own theory, I question Tappan's use of the autobiography to illustrate his theory. Utilizing data sources beyond the a…
Sensitizing Questions: A Method to Facilitate Analyzing the Meaning of an Utterance
A Neo-Meadian Approach to Human Agency: Relating the Social and the Psychological in the Ontogenesis of Perspective-Coordinating Persons
Beyond ideal speech situations: Adapting to communication asymmetries in health care
Inclusive, unconstrained and honest communication is widely advocated as beneficial and ethical. We critically explore this assumption by reflecting upon our research in acute care, informal care and public health. Using Habermas' ideals of dialogue to conceptualise ideal speech, we concur with observations that health care is often characterised by intractable exclusions and constraints. Rather than advocating implementing the ideals of dialogue…
Collaborative Research, Knowledge and Emergence
Exchanging social positions: Enhancing perspective taking within a cooperative problem solving task
When people occupy different social positions within a cooperative task they experience discrepant role and situation demands and thus have divergent perspectives. The reported research predicts that exchanging social positions within a cooperative task can overcome divergences of perspective. This prediction was tested in two experiments using the Communication Conflict Situation. The first experiment ( n = 88) found that position exchange incre…
Reproducibility in Psychology: Theoretical Distinction of Different Types of Replications
Alterity and the Transformation of Social Representations: A Sociocultural Account
Multi-Resolution Design: Using Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses to Recursively Zoom in and out of the Same Dataset
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 Researcher as Experimental Subject: Using Self-Experimentation to Access Experiences, Understand Social Phenomena, and Stimulate Reflexivity
Patient neglect in 21st century health-care institutions: A community health psychology perspective
Despite the technological and organisational advances of 21st century health-care systems, care scandals and burgeoning complaints from patients have raised concerns about patient neglect in hospitals. This article reviews the concept of patient neglect and the role of community health psychology in understanding its occurrence. Patient neglect has previously been conceptualised as a problem associated with hospital staff attitudes and behaviours…
Social Networking Sites: Mediating the Self and its Communities
What do social networking sites reveal about the relation between the self and the community? We conceptualise social networking sites as technologies of the self and the community enabling individuals to self‐present and also objectifying the community's evaluation of individuals (through ‘structures of recognition’ such as page views, friends and lovehearts). We analyse the way in which 37 Scottish adolescents used the social networking site Be…
Services and Uneven Development
This book surveys the development of service industries in Britain from a geographical perspective, assessing their contribution to other sectors of the economy. The location of new service industries is described and explained, with an analysis of the effect of locational changes on employment opportunities and patterns. The contributors consider the economic role of private sector producer services and provide a British view of issues to comple…
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…
G.H. Mead: Theorist of the Social Act
There have been many readings of Mead's work, and this paper proposes yet another: Mead, theorist of the social act. It is argued that Mead's core theory of the social act has been neglected, and that without this theory, the concept of taking the attitude of the other is inexplicable and the contemporary relevance of the concept of the significant symbol is obfuscated. The paper traces the development of the social act out of Dewey's theory of t…
Malcolm X and His Autobiography: Identity Development and Self-narration
This paper takes up Tappan's (2005) project of analyzing the identity development of Malcolm X. Considering Malcolm X's autobiography as an instance of mediated action, I show how he uses the mediational tool of 'development as metamorphosis' to narrate himself. Because of the similarity between this mediational tool and Tappan's own theory, I question Tappan's use of the autobiography to illustrate his theory. Utilizing data sources beyond the a…
Descartes’ Demon: A Dialogical Analysis of Meditations on First Philosophy
Descartes argued that the existence of reflective thought should be the first principle of philosophy because it is indubitable. The present paper draws on Bakhtinian and Meadian theories to analyse the three key paragraphs in the Meditations in which Descartes argues this point. The analysis demonstrates: (1) that Descartes’ text contains the traces of significant others and the discourses of his time; (2) that the sequence of thoughts that lead…
Games and the Development of Perspective Taking
It is widely acknowledged that perspective taking is fundamental to the development of the self, the development of the individual’s ability to interact meaningfully with other people and to the successful functioning of society. Attempts to articulate the mechanisms underlying perspective taking have relied upon internal cognitive mechanisms; the child can imitate (or internally simulate) the perspective of others by virtue of identifying with t…
Tourist Photography and the Reverse Gaze
The interaction between tourist photographer and local photographee is a dynamic site of identity construction. To date, this interaction has been theorized mainly in terms of the power of the tourist photographer, which has been shown to mediate and commodify local cultures and create new identities amongst those photographed. The present article contributes a change of emphasis by examining the sociopsychological dynamics of the reverse gaze an…
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…
Collaborative Research, Knowledge and Emergence
Conflicting community commitments: A dialogical analysis of a British woman's World War II diaries
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…
Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England
Journal Article Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England Get access Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, IN: U. of Notre Dame P., 2006; pp. lii + 562. $50). Alexandra Gillespie Alexandra Gillespie University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Engl…
Social Representations, Alternative Representations and Semantic Barriers
Social representations research has tended to focus upon the representations that groups have in relation to some object. The present article elaborates the concept of social representations by pointing to the existence of “alternative representations” as sub‐components within social representations. Alternative representations are the ideas and images the group has about how other groups represent the given object. Alternative representations ar…
Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis
Intersubjectivity refers to the variety of possible relations between perspectives. It is indispensable for understanding human social behaviour. While theoretical work on intersubjectivity is relatively sophisticated, methodological approaches to studying intersubjectivity lag behind. Most methodologies assume that individuals are the unit of analysis. In order to research intersubjectivity, however, methodologies are needed that take relationsh…
Fragmentation or Differentiation: Questioning the Crisis in Psychology
A Pragmatist Approach to the Problem of Knowledge in Health Psychology
The multiplicity of forms of health-related knowledge, including biomedical knowledge, lay knowledge and critical constructionist knowledge, raises challenges for health researchers. On one hand, there is a demand for a pluralist acceptance of the variety of health-related knowledge. On the other, the need to improve health calls for action, and thus for choices between opposing forms of knowledge. The present article proposes a pragmatist approa…
The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X
Malcolm X is one of the most important figures in the twentieth-century struggle for equality in America. With the passing of time, and changing attitudes to race and religion in American society, the significance of a public figure like Malcolm X continues to evolve and to challenge. This Companion presents new perspectives on Malcolm X's life and legacy in a series of specially commissioned essays by prominent scholars from a range of disciplin…
Using Resources: Conceptualizing the Mediation and Reflective Use of Tools and Signs
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…
A Neo-Meadian Approach to Human Agency: Relating the Social and the Psychological in the Ontogenesis of Perspective-Coordinating Persons
Moving between frames: The basis of the stable and dialogical self
Research on the dialogical self has tended to emphasize instability over stability. Grossen and Salazar Orvig (2011) show how norms, values, material objects, and institutions feed into the stability of the self. We expand upon this contribution by introducing Goffman’s (1974) concept of “frames” to theorize both stability and instability. Social interactions do not begin with individuals but with socially given and pre-existing cultural-historic…
Exchanging social positions: Enhancing perspective taking within a cooperative problem solving task
When people occupy different social positions within a cooperative task they experience discrepant role and situation demands and thus have divergent perspectives. The reported research predicts that exchanging social positions within a cooperative task can overcome divergences of perspective. This prediction was tested in two experiments using the Communication Conflict Situation. The first experiment ( n = 88) found that position exchange incre…
Encountering Alterity: Geographic and Semantic Movements
This chapter analyzes the semantic consequences of crossing national borders. When crossing borders, identities change, and alterity is encountered. We ask: what are the semantic structures, or meanings, that enable alterity to be either embraced or resisted? We start by distinguishing between movements in geographic space and semantic movements of meaning. Our aim is to link geographic movements to semantic movements, but not in a linear way. Th…
Four problems for researchers using social categories
Research on lay categorization processes has revealed that it can lead to distortions. Yet researchers routinely categorize people into groups and cultures. We argue that researchers should be aware that social categories are (1) perspectival, (2) historical, (3) disrupted by the movement of people, and (4) re-constitutive of the phenomena they seek to describe. We illustrate these problems with reference to contemporary research on globalization…
Dialogue: Bridging Personal, Community, and Social Transformation
The concept and practice of dialogue has underpinned key developments in humanistic psychotherapy and counseling. However, dialogue has also been adopted by, and incorporated into, a range of educational, community and social theories and practices, and in this sense forms a valuable bridge between humanistic psychology and the wider field of sociopolitical theory and activity. This article critically reviews how the concept of dialogue has been …
Meaning making in motion: Bodies and minds moving through institutional and semiotic structures
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…
Insights from Societal Psychology: The Contextual Politics of Change
In this paper we demonstrate that societal psychology makes a unique contribution to the study of change through its focus on the 'contextual politics' of change, examining the different interests at stake within any social context. Societal psychology explores the contexts which promote or inhibit social and societal change and can be seen as a bridge between social and political psychology. It focuses on how the context shapes the ways in which…
Sociology (36 works) · Psychology (35 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Social Representations and Identity (27 works) · Computer Science (25 works) · Social Psychology (22 works) · Community Health and Development (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Social science (12 works)