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.

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 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.

The Anthropocene has become a field of studies in which the influence of human activity on the Earth System and nature is both the main threat and the potential solution. Social Representations Theory has been evolving since the 1960s.It links knowledge and practice in everyday life and is an effective way to deal with systemic crises based on common sense. This book assembles key contributions by Latin American scholars working with social representations in the social sciences that are of conceptual relevance to the study of the Anthropocene and that investigate the societal consequences of complex interrelations between common sense and topics of global relevance, such asthe contradictions of sustainable development, the construction of risks beyond risk-perception, health, negotiation and governance in the field of education, gender equality, the usefulness of longitudinal and systemic ethnography and case studies, and agency and the link between inequality, crises and risk society in the context of COVID-19, presenting theoretical and methodological innovations fromSpanish, Portuguese and Frenchresearchthat have rarely been available in English. • This is the first book to address the relevance of Social Representations Theory for the Anthropocene as a societal era• It presents the multidisciplinary scope of Social Representations• This book covers emerging research contributions in Social Representations Theory from Latin America• This book presents innovative research and commentaries by established researchers in the field• This multidisciplinary book should be in the libraries of many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities