Dialogicality And Social Representations

Develops a theory of social knowledge based on dialogicality and social representation.

Creating a stimulating social theory with long-lasting influence for generations of scholars is driven by multiple interacting factors. The fortune of a theory is determined not only by the author's creative mind but also by the ways in which principal concepts are understood and interpreted. The proper understanding of a social theory requires a good grasp of major historical, political, and cultural challenges that contribute to its making. Considering these issues, Marková explores Serge Moscovici's theory of social representations and communication as a case study in the making of a dialogical social theory. She analyses both the undeveloped features and the forward-moving, inspirational highlights of the theory and presents them as a resource for linking issues and problems from diverse domains and disciplines. This dialogical approach has the potential to advance the dyad Self–Other as an irreducible intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic unit in epistemologies of the human and social sciences.

Marková offers a dialogical perspective to problems in daily life and professional practices involving communication, care, and therapy.

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.

Psychologists and linguists examine the role of mutualities (e.g. of culture) in effective communication.

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.

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.

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.