This book presents a theoretical framework developed to support psychologists working with indigenous people and interethnic communities. Departing from the cultural shock experienced as a psychologist working with indigenous people in Brazil, Dr. Danilo Silva Guimarães identifies the limits of traditional psychological knowledge to deal with populations who don’t share the same ethos of the European societies who gave birth to psychology as a modern science and proposes a new approach to go beyond the epistemological project that aimed to construct a subject able to represent the world free from any cultural mediation. According to the author, the purpose of cultural psychology is to produce general psychological theories about the cultural mediation of the self, others and world relationships. Based on this assumption, he argues that to achieve this aim, cultural psychology needs to understand how indigenous perspectives participate in the process of knowledge construction, transforming psychological conceptions and practices. In this volume, the author presents his own contribution to open cultural psychology to indigenous perspectives by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the notion of dialogical multiplication for the construction of work in co-authorship in the relation between psychology and indigenous peoples. With the growing migrations around the world, competences in psychological communication across cultures are more demanded each day, which makes Dialogical Multiplication – Principles for an Indigenous Psychology a critical resource for psychologists working with interethnic and intercultural communities around the world.

This book takes an epistemological and theoretical stance in investigating the phenomenon of creativity and its processes. Creativity is analyzed through the lens of cultural psychology, in which psychological processes emerge over the course of life, and can only be understood in relation to the subject’s history and life experiences. Dialogism is presented as central for the constitutive dynamics of the developing subject and the emergence of creative actions through the expression of human agency. The authors highlight Bakhtinian dialogism and its developments in the scientific field of psychology and related areas to shed new light on creativity and its processes. The authors argue this will enable a better understanding of creativity in its development and emergence, and its impact on individuals and society.

This book brings together two decades of work by the authors on dialogical networks, showing how the concept of the dialogical network developed through series of connected case studies and clarifying the concept through historical analysis. Identifying the key characteristics of dialogical networks and showing that knowledge of them, though formulated in the abstract, is affected by historical contingencies, it demonstrates that work on dialogical networks required the work of a practical historian, connecting contemporary work to foregoing studies. As such, this volume represents an original study of how doing history is a part of research and sheds light on the ways in which people use the past in their social activities.

This edited volume brings together some of the most prominent scholars in the fields of theoretical, critical, and political psychology to examine crisis phenomena. The book investigates the role of psychology as a science in times of crisis, discusses how socio-political change affects the discipline and profession, and renders psychological interventions as forms of political action. The authors examine how notions of crisis and the interpretation of crisis scenarios are heavily intertwined with governmental and state interests. Seeking to disentangle individual subjectivity, subjectification, and science as forms of politics, the volume works toward an explicit goal to decolonize psychology. The chapters elaborate on the importance of the psychological sciences in times of crisis and the role of psychologists as practitioners. Ultimately, the diverse contributions underline the connection of scientific theory, practice, and politics. Interdisciplinary in scope and wide-ranging in its perspectives, this timely work will appeal to students and scholars of theoretical and political psychology, critical psychology, and cultural studies.

This book presents a collection of interrelated essays that analyze the theoretical foundations of semiotic-cultural constructivism in psychology written by one of the pioneers in this field of research: Dr. Lívia Mathias Simão, senior professor at the Institute of Psychology of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In each of the five essays included in this book, the author establishes a dialogue with key thinkers and intellectual traditions of dialogical approaches arriving at core points of I-other relationships according to the perspective of semiotic-cultural constructivism in psychology. The first essay establishes a dialogue with Greek philosophers such as Parmenides and Aristotle. In the second essay this dialogue is established with semiotic-constructivist psychologists such as Jaan Valsiner, Ragnar Rommetveit and Ivana Marková. The third essay is a dialogue with the contributions of Ernst Boesch’s symbolic action theory. The fourth essay proposes a dialogue between semiotic-cultural constructivists and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Finally, the fifth essay proposes how the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas contributes to dialogical studies of I-other in the context of semiotic-cultural constructivism. Originally published in Portuguese for the Brazilian market, Dialogical Essays: From Difference to Sharing in I-Other Relationships is now published in English in an international edition that will be of interest to psychologists, philosophers, historians and other human and social scientists interested in epistemological, ontological and ethical aspects of I-other relationships from the perspective of semiotic-cultural constructivism and cultural psychology.

A volume in Advances in Cultural Psychology Series Editor: Jaan Valsiner, Aalborg University This book comes as part of a broader project the editor is developing aiming critically to articulate some theoretical and methodological issues of cultural psychology with the research and practical work of psychologists with Amerindian peoples. As such, the project - of which the present book is part - concerns to a meta-theoretical reflection aiming to bring in new theoretical-methodological and ethical reflections to Cultural Psychology. From this meta-theoretical reflection we have been developing the notion of dialogical multiplication as it implies the diversification (differentiation and dedifferentiation) of semiotic trajectories in interethnic boundaries.

Venturing out of the laboratory into the wild of natural settings, it becomes untenable to locate memory strictly in the head. Instead, memory appears as a materially extended and socially distributed process, embedded within culture and history. This book explores the complex relations between practices of remembering and the settings in which they are enacted. It advances a novel set of concepts developed from ecological, cognitive, cultural and narrative currents in psychology and further afield to analyze (1) trajectories of autobiographical remembering, (2) the relation between individual and collective memory, (3) memory and cultural transmission, as well as (4) various methodological techniques to investigate memory in the wild.

This book explores the deep, imaginative, and creative power of poetry as part of the human experience. How poetry provides insight into human psychology is a question at the beginning of its theoretical development, and is a constant challenge for cultural psychologists and the humanities alike. Poetry functions, in all ages and cultures, as a rite that merges the beauty, truth and the unbearable conditions of existence. Both the general and the particular can be found in its expression. Collectively the authors aim to evoke a holistic understanding of what poetry conveys about decision making and the human search for meaning. This ground-breaking collection will be indispensable to scholars of clinical and theoretical psychology, philosophy, anthropology, literature, aesthetics and sociology.

The volume revolves around the theme ‘inclusive oppositions’ in social sciences that address the issue of making of distinctions and create artificial dichotomies and dualistic view of society. It is set against the currents of systematic reduction of anthropodiversity and psychodiversity, which appears as a pathology of the current neo-liberalist and colonialist model of development. The volume is an attempt to overcome the colonial tendencies and forces to ‘standardize’ and ‘homogenize’ various categories and institutions in society by establishing structural relationality and intersectionality between the parts of the whole ecosystem where in the human and non-human intersect and interact. The volume brings together a unique collaboration in the field of Cultural Psychology and offers the intellectual tools to grasp how a syncretic understanding of Identity and Culture unfolds, particularly in the key domain of gender. The chapters and commentaries uncover cultural dynamics and identity formation from a specific location, the region of Kerala in south-western India. The chapters and commentaries in this volume illustrates that Kerala is a cultural micro-cosmos, in which gender, identity, religion, ethnicity, caste, global market and tradition intersect to create complex and multiple subjects that do not fit in binary categorizations. The compiled volume will be of great value to scholars, researchers and academicians in Social Sciences, particularly Cultural Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology, Social Work, Political Science, Philosophy, Anthropology and Economics.