Culture & Psychology

This article aims to discuss the relationship between personal cultural experience and knowledge construction in psychology, from the perspective of the Semiotic-Cultural Constructivism. The thoughts here presented are, at the same time, from within psychology and about psychology. The researcher is culturally situated and science is a field of production of cultural works that aims to create perspectives of knowledge about the world. Researchers can and must create some detachment from their field of study to be able to understand the course of their own knowledge constructions. This detachment is achieved through a historical–philosophical view on the theoretical–methodological propositions of their field of research. As a case study, we selected for analysis the field’s pioneer productions, from the years 1982 to 2004. The material showed that the rationality that characterizes scientific research is directed, in this field, to creating semiotic resources for further developing reflexivity in psychology, as a recursive and open-ended process. The theoretical–methodological work of the researcher concerns its own personal cultural experience and the tradition of the already constructed knowledge, selected to a dialogue about the ethical implications of human action. Therefore, advances in psychological knowledge construction cannot be addressed from an external, allegedly neutral point of view, focused on the efficacy of the instruments resulting from the said “scientific progress.”

The article provides an analysis of the affective polarization of the public sphere, namely, the increasing momentum gained by affective sensemaking in the current socio-institutional scenario (e.g. raise of populism, distrust in democracy and spreading xenophobia). To this end, the Semiotic Cultural Psychology Theory (SCPT) is outlined. The SCPT focuses on the embodied micro-mechanisms bridging the intra- and inter-psychological levels of analysis of the semiotic dynamics. The article is composed of two parts. First, the SCPT is outlined in terms of its nine underlying tenets. Then, SCPT is used to frame an interpretation of the psycho-social dynamics underpinning the current socio-political scenario. Based on the SCPT model, the spread of affective sensemaking in current societal dynamics is interpreted as being due to the capacity of affects to work as semiotic stabilizers, enabling people to face the deep uncertainty fostered by the economic and political turmoil associated with globalization.

Sociocultural psychology is now a firmly established approach to human meaning making (Bruner, 1990) and meaning construction (Valsiner, 2014). Its proponents rightly see culture not as a causal power but as a set of resources used by human agents (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010). However, I argue in this article that this approach needs to be balanced by the phenomenological insight from Heidegger and others that meaning is not always “made” but can also be “found.” Following Rosa (2019), I argue that we should be careful not to reduce our relationship to the world to one of active agents that use passive resources as this easily mirrors the experiences of alienation in modernity. Humans display not only agency but also what I will call “patiency” in letting the world speak or resonate as we relate to it as more than a set of resources.

Economic theory propagates a model of the human being commonly known as homoeconomicus; an individual with a rational orientation directed towards maximizing his/her preferences. However, our everyday lives involve many altruistic acts. These can range from small gestures of kindness such as holding a door open for another person, to heroic feats such as risking one's life to save a child from drowning. During our lives we also meet certain people that instantly induce our kindness. Our nicety in these moments is not based on a pursuit to optimize our material desires. Rather, we allow our feelings and intuitions to guide the course of our actions. How do we reconcile these experiences against the economic conception of human nature as inherently selfish? Addressing this contradiction, the paper will deconstruct the economic view and repositioning it as the product of an epistemological stance that distorts our view of altruism. An alternative model on altruism will then be developed by merging anthropological theories on value with insights from cultural psychology and grounded cognition. Through this process, a passage will be shown from static and universalizing perspective towards an emergent and dynamic theory on altruism.

This article discusses theoretical challenges in conceptualising the dialectical relationship between historical conditions and the situated interplay between people in concrete everyday practice. The concept of conflict may help us move beyond tendencies within psychology to separate history and situated practice, structure and activity, and micro- and macroprocesses – and to regard social life as unambiguous or as governed through hegemony. Research on the everyday social life of schools describes societal conflicts about education and how school children deal with unequal conditions when handling the conflictuality of their everyday lives. Analyses of coordination and conflicts between various parties (e.g. children, parents, teachers and psychologists) elucidate connections between intersubjective efforts to make things work in everyday practice and historical struggles related to the school as a social institution. Concepts are required that enable understanding of these processes as historical and political, driven by intersubjectivity related to concrete dilemmas, connected to personal and collaborative conduct of everyday life – processes we term the politics of everyday life. From a social practice perspective, we discuss how to grasp the ways in which people constitute the conditions for each other in a situated interplay in which they deal with common problems and – through these activities – also produce history.

The Internet has provided a new context for the exploration of the concept of identity. Different identities were expressed on different online settings, which indicates the feature of ‘situational selves’ of online identities. By comparing the differences among WeChat identity, Weibo identity and offline identity, more examples were introduced not only to explain ‘situational selves’, but also the ‘rationality’ in choosing among different online identities.

Didactics as a science is based on psychology and has developed a system of principles that underpin its theoretical body using psychological results. The article analyzes the principles that have been addressed in the literature so far. Subsequently, the essential postulates of the Subjectivity Theory as a slope of the historical–cultural approach are discussed. Finally, new principles that support a didactic system based on the theory of subjectivity are defined.

School mealtimes in England are highly orchestrated practices that have a specific temporal order of when and how the meal should be eaten. At the same time, the social conditions of the mealtime offer children opportunities for emergent interactions. In this study, we examine children’s non-legitimate voices and the dynamic conflictual nature of children’s interactions that are no longer fully governed by the established school mealtime order. To illustrate these ideas, data are drawn from the 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the first author in a primary school in South West England. The analyses address how children use the school mealtime chronotope as a resource to experiment and challenge predefined rules. Our findings illustrate how children transcend the edges of acceptability and probe social order to form their own social critique and uncovering what is not easily explainable or changeable. As an implication we underline the potential for researching children’s socialisation as part of expanding discussions on the significance of school mealtimes.