Develops a theory of social knowledge based on dialogicality and social representation.

Marková offers a dialogical perspective to problems in daily life and professional practices involving communication, care, and therapy.

This Handbook provides the requisite theoretical and methodological guidelines for undertaking social research addressing relevant contemporary social issues.

This book scrutinizes how social – common sense – knowledge is shared, transmitted and transformed in different social and psychological contexts, particularly in research related to education, social work and communication.

Drawing on the non-individualistic perspective of social representations theory, this book presents an alternative view of social identity by articulating the inseparable dynamic relationships that exist between content, process and power relations when social identity is embedded in social knowledge.

This book presents the main findings of an empirical exploration of media discourses on social representations of “otherness” in seven European countries. It focuses on the analysis of press discourses produced over a fifteen-year period (2000–2015) on three contemporary figures of otherness that challenge the identity of European societies, question the attitudes towards diversity, and pose significant challenges for policy-makers: immigration, Islam, and LGBT. The book provides a comprehensive and articulate map of how national media addresses such themes from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, revealing patterns of continuity and discontinuity across time and space. Lastly, it discusses these patterns in the light of their cultural meanings and their influence on social and political collective behaviours.

Contemporary research in personality, social psychology and sociology has renewed an interest in the self. This volume argues that the self may consist fo multiple selves, any of which may interact with each other in a dialogical fashion. The self is presented as a non-unitary embodiment that transcends the limits of individualism and rationalism. Beginning with philosophical discussion of the self, this volume discusses the decentralization of the self in narrative psychology, the retreat of the omniscient narrator in literary sciences, the genesis of self-knowledge in children and the concept of modern society as a multiplicity of collective voices.

In this classic edition of her groundbreaking text Knowledge in Context, Sandra Jovchelovitch revisits her influential work on the societal and cultural processes that shape the development of representational processes in humans. Through a novel analysis of processes of representation, and drawing on dialogues between psychology, sociology and anthropology, Jovchelovitch argues that representation, a social psychological construct relating Self, Other and Object-world, is at the basis of all knowledge. Exploring the dominant assumptions of western conceptions of knowledge and the quest for a unitary reason free from the ‘impurities’ of person, community and culture, Jovchelovitch recasts questions related to historical comparisons between the knowledge of adults and children, ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ peoples, scientists and lay communities and examines the ambivalence of classical theorists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Freud, Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl in addressing these issues. Featuring a new introductory chapter, the author evaluates the last decade of research since Knowledge in Context first appeared and reassesses the social psychology of the contemporary public sphere, exploring how challenges to the dialogicality of representations reconfigure both community and selfhood in this early 21st century. This book will make essential reading for all those wanting to follow debates on knowledge and representation at the cutting edge of social, cultural and developmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, development and cultural studies.

This book lays the foundation to the author's widely acclaimed theory of social representations, a theory that re-defines the field of social psychology, its problems, concepts and their symbolic and communicative functions, and that formulates a profoundly interactive study of complex social phenomena.

In a boundary-crossing and globalizing world, the personal and social positions in self and identity become increasingly dense, heterogeneous and even conflicting. In this handbook scholars of different disciplines, nations and cultures (East and West) bring together their views and applications of dialogical self theory in such a way that deeper commonalities are brought to the surface. As a 'bridging theory', dialogical self theory reveals unexpected links between a broad variety of phenomena, such as self and identity problems in education and psychotherapy, multicultural identities, child-rearing practices, adult development, consumer behaviour, the use of the internet and the value of silence. Researchers and practitioners present different methods of investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, and also highlight applications of dialogical self theory.