Imagination in children entering culture

Although children are born in a world of already established cultural practices and social representations, the appropriation and internalisation of culture is not a task of reproduction but one of imaginative construction. The cultural development of the child offers an empirical opportunity to examine the role of the imagination in the practices whereby human children enter culture. In this chapter we focus on three such practices – care, play, and storytelling – to observe the imagination at work. We start by revisiting understandings of the imagination and propose a positive view that sees it as the human capacity to go beyond the immediate situation and play with possible realities. We suggest that the interplay between presence and absence, grounded in the interactions between self and other established by culture, is the defining feature of the imagination. Drawing on our research on children’s representations of the public sphere we explore the complexity of children’s imagination and propose a typology of engagement with the absent: the not yet there, impinged by anticipation and desire; the nowhere, pertaining to the fictional and the fantastic; and the elsewhere, characterised by absent elements the child is aware of through direct or indirect experience. Throughout the chapter, we are guided by the question of how these types of engagement with absence, which are central to the imagination, play out in practices of care, play, and storytelling. This exploration helps us understand the imagination as both an engine and a consequence of development, central for the cognitive, emotional and cultural development of the child and for the development of culture itself. By imagining the world both as what it is and as different from the way it is, we show that 1) children’s imaginative engagement guides the micro-genesis of cognition and macro-processes of cultural development and 2) it establishes the freedom to create as a key process in the realisation of self and society

Imagination and mobility in the city: porosity of borders and human development in divided urban environments

We focus on the notion of borders to explore how mobility and immobility in the city affect the relationship between human development and urban culture. We define borders as a relational space made of territoriality, representations and different possibilities of mobility and immobility. Drawing on research in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, we suggest a systematic approach to the analysis of borders and identify the socio-institutional, spatial and symbolic elements that make them more or less porous and thus more or less amenable to human mobility. We highlight the association between porosity in city borders and human development and illustrate the model contrasting two favela communities in Rio de Janeiro. We show that participation in the socio-cultural environment by favela grassroots organisations increases the porosity of internal city borders and contributes to the development of self, communities and the city. To focus on borders, their different elements and levels of porosity means to address simultaneously the psychosocial and cultural layers of urban spaces and the novel ways through which grassroots social actors develop themselves through participation and semiotic reconstruction of the socio-cultural environment

Discourse and representation: a comment on Batel and Castro ‘re-opening the dialogue between the theory of social representations and discursive psychology’

Batel and Castro propose to integrate conceptually and empirically social representations theory (SRT) and discursive psychology (DP). This comment emphasises the importance of debates between different traditions of social psychology, focusing on the status of psychological entities and methodological pluralism as two areas in which fruitful tensions between DP and SRT are still evident. It critiques DP’s disavowal of psychological entities and reaffirms the insights of socio-cultural traditions that see intra-psychological entities as internalised sociality. It argues that rather than considering individual methods, the focus should be on the fit between research questions, context and methodology. A simultaneous focus on theory, research questions and analytical tools is best for dealing with the limitations as well as potentials of the methodological toolkit available for the study of meaning in context

A qualitative analysis of migrant social workers’ work experiences and perceived prejudice from an empowering acculturative integration approach

An increasing number of migrant social workers are employed in the UK social work sector. This article explores the acculturative integration experiences of a small group of migrant social workers. We critically observe that research on migrant professionals’ trajectories should adopt theories that emphasise people’s empowerment and potential for agency. We use a framework drawing on liberation psychology for analysing the autobiographical narratives of a sample of migrant social workers employed in England. Findings indicate that the participants perceived prejudice on a number of occasions and circumstances. Even though in their narrative of survival they talked about activating several psychosocial resources, they were sceptical about their professional development and dissatisfied at work. The paper discusses the emerging findings while highlighting the framework’s relevance for understanding these experiences from an empowering acculturation perspective and suggesting ways of improving migrant social workers’ acculturative integration by addressing systemic barriers

“I want to do well for myself as well!”: Constructing coaching careers in elite women’s football

There is a limited understanding of career development of sport coaches, especially from the subjective perspective focused on personal meaning and evaluation of this life project in sport. We drew on career construction theory and narrative methodology to explore football coaches’ career development, adaptability resources, and the meanings they assigned to their journeys. Ten women’s football (soccer) coaches (2 women) aged 23-60 in England took part in narrative interviews which we analysed using thematic narrative analysis. Our analysis indicated that early immersion into the football narrative context most often resulted in low career exploration and a strong commitment to coaching as an attempt to keep the footballing identity narrative ‘going’. Whilst the majority of coaches had a full-time occupation elsewhere, they self-identified as professional coaches and approached coaching with a career orientation animated by a desire to progress to a full-time coaching position. The coaches were resourceful and active career agents in crafting their careers in football; however, most of them expressed little concern or curiosity for other careers aside professional coaching, leaving them vulnerable to psychological distress if unable to realise their career ambition. The findings illustrate the seductive nature of football with the narrative context providing coaches with a cherished sense of identity but also bringing a permanent sense of insecurity and costs to their lives outside of the game

Social representations and the politics of participation

Recent work has called for the integration of different perspectives into the field of political psychology (Haste, 2012). This chapter suggests that one possible direction that such efforts can take is studying the role that social representations theory (SRT) can play in understanding political participation and social change. Social representations are systems of common-sense knowledge and social practice; they provide the lens through which to view and create social and political realities, mediate people's relations with these sociopolitical worlds and defend cultural and political identities. Social representations are therefore key for conceptualising participation as the activity that locates individuals and social groups in their sociopolitical world. Political participation is generally seen as conditional to membership of sociopolitical groups and therefore is often linked to citizenship. To be a citizen of a society or a member of any social group one has to participate as such. Often political participation is defined as the ability to communicate one's views to the political elite or to the political establishment (Uhlaner, 2001), or simply explicit involvement in politics and electoral processes (Milbrath, 1965). However, following scholars on ideology (Eagleton, 1991; Thompson, 1990) and social knowledge (Jovchelovitch, 2007), we extend our understanding of political participation to all social relations and also develop a more agentic model where individuals and groups construct, develop and resist their own views, ideas and beliefs. We thus adopt a broader approach to participation in comparison to other political-psychological approaches, such as personality approaches (e.g. Mondak and Halperin, 2008) and cognitive approaches or, more recently, neuropsychological approaches (Hatemi and McDermott, 2012). We move away from a focus on the individual's political behaviour and its antecedents and outline an approach that focuses on the interaction between psychological and political phenomena (Deutsch and Kinnvall, 2002) through examining the politics of social knowledge

Power struggles in the remembering of historical intergroup conflict: hegemonic and counter-narratives about the Argentine “Conquest of the Desert”

This work has been supported by funding from the research projects PICT-2012–1594 and PICT-2014–1003 (FONCyT-Argentina), and a grant from the Latin American Studies, University of Uta

Diasporic virginities: social representations of virginity and identity formation amongst British arab muslim women

This study compares how practising and non-practising British Arab Muslim women position themselves in relation to representations of virginity. Overall, in our qualitative study, we found that representations of culture and religion influenced social practices and social beliefs in different ways: non-practising Muslim women felt bound by culture to remain virgins, while practising Muslim women saw it as a religious obligation but were still governed by culture regarding the consequences of engaging in premarital sex. Interestingly, some practising Muslim participants used Mut’a (a form of temporary ‘marriage’) to justify premarital sex. This, however, did not diminish the importance of virginity in their understanding and identification as Arab women. In fact, this study found that virginity, for the British Arabs interviewed, embodied a sense of ‘Arabness’ in British society. Positioning themselves as virgins went beyond simply honour; it was a significant cultural symbol that secured their sense of cultural identity. In fact this cultural identity was often so powerful that it overrode their Islamic identities, prescribing their behaviour even if religion was seen as more ‘forgiving’

Empowerment of intergroup harmony and equity

The impact of empowerment interventions is often short-lived because they are not anchored in changes in the wider social and structural context. This chapter draws its inspiration from social representation theory and social identity theory. Several theoretical propositions are derived from these theories that bear on the effectiveness of empowerment interventions. Drawing on field experiences with Roma communities and young unemployed people in Hungary and Italy, we demonstrate how a focus on intergroup interactions, between minority and majority group members, is central to the empowerment process. In addition, we address the role of power and the means by which power can be dissembled and more equitably shared. Finally, we discuss the importance of placing contextual factors at the center of our analysis and enacting changes in context in order to arrive at empowerment interventions that produce sustainable changes in intergroup harmony and equity