James Cresswell – författare

Culture and the Cognitive Science of Religion is the first book to bring together cultural psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Containing much-needed discussion of how good research should do more than simply follow methodological prescriptions, this thought-provoking and original book outlines the ways in which CSR can be used to study everyday religious belief without sacrificing psychological science. Cresswell’s pragmatist approach expands CSR in a radically new direction. The author shows how language and culture can be integrated within CSR in order to achieve an alternative ontogenetic and phylogenetic approach to cognition, and argues that a view of cognition that is not based on modularity, but on the dynamic connection between an organism and its milieu, can lead to a view of evolution that makes much more room for the constitutive role of culture in cognition. As a provocative attempt to persuade researchers to engage with religious communities more directly, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students, as well as psychologists interested in the cognitive science of religion, theological anthropology, religious studies and cultural anthropology.

Interweaving rich theory on dialogism, power, and resistance together with situated scenarios addressing the production of psychological knowledge, this book explores decoloniality as it interfaces with strategic fields in psychology.Current movements in global sentiment have raised important calls for decolonial action. In this volume an international set of authors come together to critically challenge power by considering how colonial mindsets develop and are retained. Drawing on dialogism inspired by Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and other leading thinkers of dialogicality, the book focuses on dialogue and how it is tied to the ability to think in ways outside colonial mindsets. It challenges approaches that run the risk of bypassing how fundamental colonialism has become for human thinking, and incorporates visions to consider how, both conceptually and methodologically, a postcolonial or decolonial psychology can be done. In so doing, it guides readers beyond the status quo to consider a program to improve psychology, formulate a new psychological culture, and bring about discussion beyond the permanent – yet generative – tension between liberating and subordinating psychologies.The book will be key reading for theoretical and critical psychology scholars and postgraduate students, particularly those interested in community engagement and decolonizing psychology. It will also be of interest to those engaged in research in Bakhtian studies, critical theory, and power studies.