This book presents an overview of the life and work of Gustav Ichheiser, a social scientist in Vienna during the early 20th century. Gustav Ichheiser, along with many other Austrian Jews of his time, was forced into exile after the rise of National Socialism in Europe. Ichheiser's work is considered an important front runner to the attribution theories. He was one of the first to study the phenomena of social misunderstandings in detail and in relation to concrete problem areas, such as success. The aim of this book is to discuss, on an international level, the importance of Ichheiser's theoretical approaches in his time and their relevance in today's context of social and cultural psychology. In addition, the tragic course of Ichheiser’s biography, an example for many displaced scientists, highlights the importance of bringing a scientist’s work back into the focus of today’s current social scientific setting. Memories of Gustav Ichheiser will be of interest to researchers as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of psychology, social psychology, sociology, and psychiatry.

This book studies how the relationship between philosophy, morality, politics, and science was conceived in the Vienna Circle and how this group of philosophers tried to position science as an antidote to totalitarianism and irrationalism. This leads to investigation of the still understudied views of the Vienna Circle on moral philosophy, meta-ethics, and the relationship between philosophy of science and politics. Including papers from an international group of scholars, The Socio-ethical Dimension of Knowledge: The Mission of Logical Empiricism addresses these topics and makes them available to scholars in the field of history of philosophy of science.

We describe people who are “consumed” or “devoured” by ambition as if by a predator or an out-of-control inferno. Thinkers since deepest antiquity have raised these questions, approaching the subject of ambition with ambivalence and often trepidation-as when the ancient Greek poet Hesiod proposed a differentiation between the good and the bad goddess Eris. Indeed, ambition as a longing for immortal fame seems to be one of the unique hallmarks of the human species. While philosophy has touched only occasionally on the problem of burning ambition, sociology, psychoanalysis, and world literature have provided rich and more revealing descriptions and examples of its shaping role in human history. Drawing on a long and varied tradition of writing on this topic, ranging from the works of Homer through Shakespeare, Freud, and Kafka and from the history of ancient Greece and Rome to the Italian Renaissance and up to the present day (to modernity and the current neoliberal era), Eckart Goebel explores our driving passion for recognition - that insatiable hunter in the mirror - and power.

This book represents the first extensive introduction to the emerging construct of Educational Self. The new concept describes a specific dimension of the Self, which is elaborated in the course of a person’s school life and is reactivated anytime the person is involved in an educational activity, whether as a student, teacher or parent. The Educational Self (ES) approach was created by the volume editors and is currently being developed at various universities in Europe and Latin America as a way of understanding and operating in educational contexts. The book presents the theoretical framework and the empirical developments of the construct, paving the way for further applications in education. The main locations of the empirical studies are Denmark, Italy, Brazil, Portugal and Colombia, but the research network is steadily expanding to other countries, so that the concept here can be generalized to different cultural contexts. The book addresses a range of contexts and moments in school life. The editors’ introduction presents the construct of ES, the opportunities for further theoretical and empirical developments of the concept, and its potential applications in educational practices. In the remainder of the volume, ES is explored for different age groups (from children to adolescents to higher education), different actors (peers, teachers, parents and their interactions), different contexts (formal education, special institutions, school-family relationships) and different phenomena (disruptive behavior, special needs, value orientation, school failure, etc.). All the studies share a qualitative idiographic approach, which is characteristic of the perspective of cultural psychology in which the ES construct was elaborated.

​This book is the outcome of a joint collaboration between East China Normal University and the University of Luxembourg, initiated by the Center of Ideas for the Basic Education of the Future (IBEF), and focuses on kindergartens in China from a cultural psychology perspective. By coupling young scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds as research tandems, this book uses an innovative methodological method to reveal a deeply immersing research perspective of the often complicated issues in the Chinese social reality, where long historical tradition and strong motivation for a “modernized” future are fused together and continuously evolve itself into a vibrant and intricate landscape. Meanings and values consciously or unconsciously promoted and conducted in the kindergarten are semiotic devices and they mediate children’s and educator’s daily behaviours and activities, which are constantly navigating among different social institutions and crossing the border of kindergarten. The book discusses the process of children’s socialization in the kindergarten from different angles such as cultural objects, moral education, conflict negotiation, children's drawing analysis and the role of Lego in numeracy development. It also provides an overview of basic educational needs in Chinese kindergartens as well as three commentaries to provide background information and to add a reflective angle for the readers. By reading the book, readers will hopefully go through a constantly transforming process between familiarizing and de-familiarizing along with the research tandem and develop their own understanding of the complex landscape of the Chinese kindergarten and its children as developing subjects constantly living and transcending the context.

Educational Dilemmas uses cultural psychology to explore the challenges, contradictions and tensions that occur during the process of education, with consideration of the effect these have at both the individual and the collective level. It argues that the focus on issues in learning overlooks a fundamental characteristic of education: that the process of educating is simultaneously both constructive and disruptive. Drawing on research from Europe, America and Asia, chapters in this volume present and analyse different experiences of the tension between disruption and construction in the process of education. Situating educational discontent within the wider context, the book demonstrates how this issue can be exacerbated by the tension between the commodification and democratisation of educational systems. This book demonstrates that these issues permeate all levels of education and, as a result, emphasises how vital it is that educational discontent is considered from a new perspective. Educational Dilemmas is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychology and education. It should also be of great interest to school psychologists, teachers and therapists.

This innovative textbook is the ideal introduction to cultural psychology. It focuses on a holistic approach, which emphasizes that culture is created and shared by minds and society. Organized around short core concept chapters, the book encourages students to think critically about culture and the theories around it. Chapters explore what cultural psychology is and its forms of knowing, how cultural psychology can be used to understand higher psychological functions, and the human psyche as a whole. Each chapter contains definitions of key concepts, real-world examples from everyday human activities, reflection questions, short biographies of key figures relevant to cultural psychology, and chapter summaries. There are also links to video interviews from leading international scholars which provide critical reflections on core concepts in cultural psychology. This is the essential introductory book for students of cultural psychology, as well as cultural studies and anthropology. It will be useful for anyone looking to learn more about the history of ideas, the human mind, and its historical and material relationship with culture.

Many accounts of critical pedagogy, particularly accounts of trying to enact it within higher education (HE), express a deep cynicism about whether it is possible to counter the ever creeping hegemony of neo-liberalism, neo- conservatism and new managerialism within Universities. Hopeful Pedagogies in Higher Education acknowledges some of these criticisms, but attempts to rescue critical pedagogy, locating some of its associated pessimism as misreading of Freire and offering hopeful avenues for new theory and practice. These misreadings are also located in the present, in the assumption that unless change comes within the lifetime of the project, it has somehow failed. Instead, this book argues that a positive utopianism is possible. Present actions need to be celebrated, and cultivated as symbols of hope, possibility and generativity for the future - which the concept of hope implies. The contributors make the case for celebrating the pedagogies of HE that operate in liminal spaces – situated in the spaces between the present and the future (between the world as it is and the world as it could be) and also in the cracks that are beginning to show in the dominant discourses.

​This volume addresses the current situation in higher education and what creative action needs to be taken for the future development of the various systems of higher education. Higher education in the 21st centuries is under immense pressure from various sides. First, there is dramatic limitation of funding from public sources and limited and selective funding support from private sources that is re-constructing the landscape of higher education in most societies around the World. Secondly there is the continuous stream of administrative re-organization efforts of political origins (e.g. “the Bologna process”) that guide the advancement of higher education in our present time. Increasing privatization of all forms of higher education—from bachelor to doctoral levels—and its corresponding focus on the advancement of the kind of knowledge that has immediate applicability in various spheres of societies leads to the question- what kind of creativity is expected from the new cohorts of students—future makers of knowledge—once the current social re-organization of higher education systems becomes fully established. To address these questions the international, interdisciplinary cast of authors in this volume provides a multitude of possible scenarios for future development of the systems of higher education. This book on “Sustainable Futures of Higher Education” captures the current trends and perspectives of the Knowledge Makers from various nations of the world on meeting and greeting the challenges of globalization and the pressures of the knowledge economy. It makes a strong case for universities of tomorrow sustaining their autonomous thinking and yet nurturing an environment of collaborative partnership with society, corporate and industry to fuel innovations in plenty and continuous supply of new science and technologies. Higher Education has been and shall remain a powerful vehicle of national and global transformation. I see a great value of the publication in impacting the minds of the leaders in higher education around the globe for revitalizing the universities. Professor P. B Sharma, President of Association of Indian Universities, AIU How should the higher education system be in the globalization era? In this book Jaan Valsiner and his colleagues analyze, criticize the existing and propose a new higher education system. When we say "higher education”, three different layers are supposed to be there-- the lower, the middle and the higher. The latter has the function of production of new knowledges. Without new knowledge, our societies are never improving. Authors warn commercialized systems such as the “Bologna system” overestimate the homogeneity of education. ““Universities without Borders” would guarantee both diversity and innovation in the higher education systems. Professor Tatsuya Sato, Dean of Research, Ritsumekan University

Based on a collection of chapters of leading scholars in the field, the purpose of this book is to intervene in current debates on the scientific foundation of psychological theory, methodology and research practice, and to offer an in-depth, situated and contextual understanding of psychological generalization. This book aims to contribute to a theoretical and methodological vocabulary which includes the subjective dimension of human life in psychological inquiry, and roots processes of generalization in persons’ common, social, cultural and material practices of everyday living. The volume is directed to students, professors, and researchers in psychology as well as to scholars in other branches of the humanities and social science where psychology and especially subjectivity, everyday practice and the development of psychological knowledge is an issue. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars in the field of cultural psychology, critical psychology, psychology of everyday life as well as psychological methodology and qualitative studies of everyday life including the various critical undergraduate, graduate, master, and PhD programs. The book will also be of special interest for scholars working in social psychology, history of psychology, general psychology, theoretical psychology, environmental psychology and political psychology.