Showing papers by "Jaan Valsiner published in 2018"

Symbolic universes between present and future of Europe. First results of the map of European societies' cultural milieu.

Abstract: This paper reports the framework, method and main findings of an analysis of cultural milieus in 4 European countries (Estonia, Greece, Italy, and UK). The analysis is based on a questionnaire applied to a sample built through a two-step procedure of post-hoc random selection from a broader dataset based on an online survey. Responses to the questionnaire were subjected to multidimensional analysis-a combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis. We identified 5 symbolic universes, that correspond to basic, embodied, affect-laden, generalized worldviews. People in this study see the world as either a) an ordered universe; b) a matter of interpersonal bond; c) a caring society; d) consisting of a niche of belongingness; e) a hostile place (others' world). These symbolic universes were also interpreted as semiotic capital: they reflect the capacity of a place to foster social and civic development. Moreover, the distribution of the symbolic universes, and therefore social and civic engagement, is demonstrated to be variable across the 4 countries in the analysis. Finally, we develop a retrospective reconstruction of the distribution of symbolic universes as well as the interplay between their current state and past, present and future socio-institutional scenarios.

Correction: Symbolic universes between present and future of Europe. First results of the map of European societies’ cultural milieu (PLoS ONE (2018) 13:1 (e0189885) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189885)

Abstract: [This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189885.].

Needed in Psychology: Theoretical Precision

Abstract: Europe's Journal of Psychology, 2018, Vol. 14(1), 1–6, doi:10.5964/ejop.v14i1.1602 Published (VoR): 2018-03-12. *Corresponding author at: Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Kroghstræde 3, 9220 Aalborg Ø, Denmark. E-mail: jvalsiner@gmail.com This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Arenas for implicit education: Looking at leftovers

Abstract: In schools and kindergartens much of education happens in “secondary places” – locations in the territory of the educational institution that are not meant for direct instruction purposes, but where all participants necessarily encounter in their daily lives. We analysed entrances, corridors and staircases from the perspective of semiotic encoding of educational values and objectives into the “secondary places”, using, as evidence, ethnographic experiences from Chinese kindergartens and schools. We demonstrate that such encoding completes the fullness of cultural organisation of the environment guaranteeing the redundancy of the educational directions of the messages.

Culture, mind, and history: Building on the contributions of Gustav Jahoda

Abstract: Gustav Jahoda was not famous. He was better than the rest of us all, busily working in the field of so-called “empirical science”—he was substantive. Gustav did not try to establish his “own line” within the booming and buzzing mindscapes of emerging cultural psychologies in the 1980s, 1990s, and in our century. Yet, he was always there—a deeply critical and constructive mind to remind us all about the ephemerality of re-labeling something into a “cultural something.” He was an honest scholar for whom all institutional absurdities of the games universities play were foreign. He was a Thinker in its own right. This is the highest appreciation any scholar of today can get. Still, he was a lone fighter for substantive efforts in the field. Psychology of today is filled with actors who want to be famous. Some have succeeded—their names and references are engraved into the collective memory of textbooks. Yet, textbooks and awards do not make science—striving, suffering, and tentatively succeeding seekers of truth do, sometimes. Psychology has suffered from remarkable erosion of its historically solid strengths (Gigerenzer et al., 1989; Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). Jahoda—over decades—watchfully pointed out cases of such kind, based on his vast historical knowledge and intuitive feeling into Africa, as well as into the history of the human sciences as a whole. Jahoda’s critical stance upon flowering fashions in the social sciences—including that for declaring culture (and cultural psychology) to be a solution to the discipline’s ills—led him to new ideas. This meant also digging deeply into the traditions of 19th century anthropology with the focus on psychic unity (in the work of Theodor Weitz—Jahoda, 1995, and more deeply in Jahoda, 2014). He focused on the origins of social psychology in the

I activate you to affect me

Abstract: I Activate You to Affect Me: Affectivating as a Cultural Psychological Phenomenon PART I: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND AFFECTIVATING. Affect, Semiotics, Volition: Heteroregulation and Affectivating Affectivating: In the Middle of Power and Pleasure in Psychology and Music Affectivating Signs: On Semiotic Interruptions Commentary: Affectivating, Normativity, and Subjectivity? PART II: EVERYDAY PHENOMENA AND AFFECTIVATING. Everything Was [Not] Beautiful At the Ballet: Children Affectivating Educational Contexts Outside School "Freedom is Not Free": Slogans Becoming Affective in Memorial Landscapes Understanding SilencePhenomena through the Boundaries of Speech: Semiotic Demand Settings Regulating Felt Experiences An Expressive Approach to Affect and Musical Experience Poetics of Affectivating Expressive Dimension of Human Experience and Affectivation Process: A Commentary on Everyday Phenomena and Affectivating Section PART III: PERSON- ENVIRONMENT RELATIONSHIP AND AFFECTIVATING. Affectivation: A Cut across The Semiotic Hierarchy of Feelings Affectivating Home Environments: Active and Affective Relations to objects Affectivating Environments in Creative Work Spaces, Sites, and Subjectivity: A Commentary PART IV: BUILDING A GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR AFFECTIVATING. New Theoretical and Methodological Ways in the Study of Affectivating What is Affectivating? Elements for a Definition and Critical Comments for the Future Conclusions: Affectivation as a Return to Vitality About the Editors. About the Contributors.

Civility of Basic Distrust: A Cultural-Psychological View on Persons-in-Society

Abstract: Cultural psychology is a hybrid of social and developmental psychology on the one hand, and of cultural anthropology on the other. In this paper I will analyze the collectivecultural processes that set the stage for individual citizens of a society to develop trust in the benevolence of its social institutions. I will demonstrate that such trust is a necessary organizational illusion that functions as a promoter of social cohesiveness of social groups and guides the internalization of the acceptance of the meta-level “just world” sign-field by individual persons. Guided by such field, persons are likely to take the risk of trusting the public communicative messages of social institutions and become involved in both constructive and destructive acts. Such non-reflexive “basic trust” in the social authorities is both needed for a social system to function, and for individual persons to legitimize their actions. Yet civil society cannot remain non-reflexive, and it is through the development of social reflexivity that the basic characteristic of human survival—basic distrust in the social institutions—is developed. The latter is illustrated by the Galis and Haviv model of discursive inaction in case of genocides. What can cultural psychology say about society in general—and of civil society in particular? At the first glance it would be inappropriate all together for anybody working in psychology to say anything about society. The two areas of investigation-into the human psyche and into the social worlds-may be best treated in their own rights as two qualitatively distinct forms of organization. However, a perfectly legitimate research target is the relationship between these two distinct levels. There is the connection—real human beings make up “the society” and then treat it as a power to which they need to obey (Valsiner, 1998, 1999). Personal need to obey may be supported by their protests against that very obeying— while involved in the act of obeying (cf. Milgram, 1974). Persons change themselves through the society by assuming prescribed roles and acting accordingly (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973). Last—but not least-they may act upon the subjective feelings of one’s personal duties in relation to “the society” (Moghaddam, 2003). All these varied

Human Psyche As Inherently Ambivalent: Semiosis of Construction and Destruction

Abstract: Psychology has been a naively positive science–focusing on the construction in its various forms: cognitive enhancement, creativity, innovations in environments, new technologies, etc. What is systematically overlooked is the destructive functions of the psyche: most of our psychological inventions are based on the pursuit of goals of destruction (creating military technologies, building forts of defense or castles, procedures of devastation, etc.). Wars and genocides have been recurrent in human history. I claim that the human psyche—through constructive semiosis—builds on the opposition of destruction and construction of new versions of cultural artifacts that further feed into further positive presentation of inherently ambivalent new oppositions.

Higher Education: From Intellectual Asylum and Fulfilling of Social Orders to Creating Arenas for Scientific Revolutions

Abstract: This conclusive chapter of the volume summarizes the different perspectives on higher education that are represented in the book. The ambivalences introduced by the “Bologna system” into higher education are outlined, with the suggestion that new alternatives to that politically motivated intervention be considered so as to guarantee the leading role of universities in the preparation of new generations of knowledge makers. A suggestion is made for establishing a privately funded University Without Borders that would raise the international collaboration to new level in the cooperation of scholars, minimizing the possibilities of pilurcal political interference into higher education by any particular country of bloc of countries.

Human Psyche Between the Mundane and the Aesthetic: The Sublime as the Arena for Semiosis

Abstract: The sublime is the locus of negotiation of the future and the past in the human constructive semiosis. Known since the eighteenth century in European aesthetic philosophy, the sublime has been recognized as the border area of the mundane and the aesthetic. Yet, as a border, its function as the connector of the ordinary and the beautiful domains has been overlooked. I posit that the constructive semiosis as universal human psychological process takes place on that border, allowing the mundane to lead to the beautiful and turning the beautiful into mundane. The result is proliferation of in-between constructions—genetic dramatisms—in the zone of the sublime.