2010/2011

Personal Development and Socio-Cultural Change

Social Sciences

Principal investigators

Hanne Haavind

Professor
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen

Professor
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Abstract

The two group leaders will gather a group a researchers to address a cluster of questions that have engaged both of us for many years, but in relation to which we have taken contrasting positions and offered different kinds of answers. The aim of the group is to establish an ongoing dialogue between two different theoretical positions in order to address a fundamental question: How do subjectivities develop in the tension between social identity-construction and meaning-making and personal emotional meaning? Hanne Haavind's work is positioned within cultural psychology, emphasizing the study of power relations of the situation and the explicit and negotiated meanings that are exchanged between the participants. Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen bases her work in recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and emphasizes unconscious meaning and emotional investment as part of the human experience and capacity. Taking these differences as our point of departure, we want to create new knowledge about the relation between personal identity and development, on the one hand, and social and cultural processes of change on the other. The project will improve the understanding of the mutual relation between the social and the personal - as both aspects can be seen in a perspective of temporal change. The participants in the group will pose the questions specifically in relation the psychological development of children and young people in a historical period when previously relatively stable categories of identity, like gender and age, have increasingly come under pressure and are challenged by the ethnic diversity present in the everyday life of children and young people. How do children and young people develop through contexts, and how are contexts transformed through new generations of young people growing up? The theoretical understanding will be developed in a way that relates closely to empirical analysis. Participants who represent different theoretical positions and different methodological approaches to reading and interpreting empirical material, and they will al bring their own recordings from interviews and naturalistic observations in order to test and compare different analytical approaches. Confronting different positions will hopefully create an analytic tension that we, after several decades of disagreement, intend to turn into a fruitful dialogue.

Fellows

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Helene Aarseth

Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Agnes Andenæs

Associate Professor
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Mona-Iren Hauge

Senior Researcher
Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies (NKVTS)
Year at CAS

Katrin Hjorth

Professor
University of Southern Denmark (SDU)
Year at CAS

Wendy Hollway

The Open University
Year at CAS

Margaretha Hydén

Professor
University of Linköping
Year at CAS

Jette kofoed

Associate Professor
Aarhus University
Year at CAS

Lynne Bonnie Layton

Assistant Professor
Harvard Medical School
Year at CAS

Helen Fiona Lucey

Dr.
University of Bath
Year at CAS

Eva Magnusson

Professor
Umeå Universitet
Year at CAS

Jeanne Marecek

Professor
Swarthmore College
Year at CAS

Anita Moe

Ph. D. Candidate
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Aina Olsvold

Ph. D. Candidate
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Ann Alison Phoenix

Professor
University of London
Year at CAS

Monica Rudberg

Professor
University of Oslo (UiO)
Year at CAS

Rachel Sarah Thomson

Professor
The Open University
Year at CAS

Barrie Thorne

Professor
University of California, Berkeley
Year at CAS

Cathy Urwin

Dr.
Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust
Year at CAS

Valerie Walkerdine

Professor
Cardiff University
Year at CAS

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