Luca Tateo – författare

This innovative textbook is the ideal introduction to cultural psychology. It focuses on a holistic approach, which emphasizes that culture is created and shared by minds and society.

Organized around short core concept chapters, the book encourages students to think critically about culture and the theories around it. Chapters explore what cultural psychology is and its forms of knowing, how cultural psychology can be used to understand higher psychological functions, and the human psyche as a whole. Each chapter contains definitions of key concepts, real-world examples from everyday human activities, reflection questions, short biographies of key figures relevant to cultural psychology, and chapter summaries. There are also links to video interviews from leading international scholars which provide critical reflections on core concepts in cultural psychology.

This is the essential introductory book for students of cultural psychology, as well as cultural studies and anthropology. It will be useful for anyone looking to learn more about the history of ideas, the human mind, and its historical and material relationship with culture.

This innovative textbook is the ideal introduction to cultural psychology. It focuses on a holistic approach, which emphasizes that culture is created and shared by minds and society.

Organized around short core concept chapters, the book encourages students to think critically about culture and the theories around it. Chapters explore what cultural psychology is and its forms of knowing, how cultural psychology can be used to understand higher psychological functions, and the human psyche as a whole. Each chapter contains definitions of key concepts, real-world examples from everyday human activities, reflection questions, short biographies of key figures relevant to cultural psychology, and chapter summaries. There are also links to video interviews from leading international scholars which provide critical reflections on core concepts in cultural psychology.

This is the essential introductory book for students of cultural psychology, as well as cultural studies and anthropology. It will be useful for anyone looking to learn more about the history of ideas, the human mind, and its historical and material relationship with culture.

Educational Dilemmas uses cultural psychology to explore the challenges, contradictions and tensions that occur during the process of education, with consideration of the effect these have at both the individual and the collective level. It argues that the focus on issues in learning overlooks a fundamental characteristic of education: that the process of educating is simultaneously both constructive and disruptive.

Drawing on research from Europe, America and Asia, chapters in this volume present and analyse different experiences of the tension between disruption and construction in the process of education. Situating educational discontent within the wider context, the book demonstrates how this issue can be exacerbated by the tension between the commodification and democratisation of educational systems. This book demonstrates that these issues permeate all levels of education and, as a result, emphasises how vital it is that educational discontent is considered from a new perspective.

Educational Dilemmas is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychology and education. It should also be of great interest to school psychologists, teachers and therapists.

Educational Dilemmas uses cultural psychology to explore the challenges, contradictions and tensions that occur during the process of education, with consideration of the effect these have at both the individual and the collective level. It argues that the focus on issues in learning overlooks a fundamental characteristic of education: that the process of educating is simultaneously both constructive and disruptive.

Drawing on research from Europe, America and Asia, chapters in this volume present and analyse different experiences of the tension between disruption and construction in the process of education. Situating educational discontent within the wider context, the book demonstrates how this issue can be exacerbated by the tension between the commodification and democratisation of educational systems. This book demonstrates that these issues permeate all levels of education and, as a result, emphasises how vital it is that educational discontent is considered from a new perspective.

Educational Dilemmas is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychology and education. It should also be of great interest to school psychologists, teachers and therapists.

The book provides a new look at the everyday relationship between psychological processes and extraordinary aspects of ordinary phenomena. Why should we deal with ordinary things? People’s life is made of everyday practical, taken-for-granted things, such as driving a car, using money, listening music, etc. When you drive from home to workplace, you are migrating between contexts. Is this an empty space you are crossing, or the time you spend into the car is something meaningful?

In psychological terms, things have, at least, three levels of existence, a material, a symbolic and an affective one. The underlying idea is that the symbolic elaboration of everyday things is characterized by the transcendence of the particular object-sign, leading to the creation of more and more complex sign fields. These fields expand according to an inclusive logic up to dialogically and dialectically incorporate opposites (i.e. clean/dirty, transparent/opaque, hide/ show, join/divide, slow/fast, etc.). Even the meaning of “ordinary” and “extraordinary” follow such an inclusive logic: if you give a positive value to ordinary, extraordinary is rule-breaking; otherwise, if ordinary means trivial, extraordinary assumes a positive value. Besides, things are cultural artifacts mediating the experience of the world, the psychological processes and the construction of mind. Reflecting upon “things” is thus a more meaningful pathway to understand Psyche.

The ubiquitous presence of imaginative work points at its importance among the higher mental functions. This collective volume discusses both the social relevance of imagination, that cannot be reduced to an inter-individual feature, and the cultural-historical conditions of imagining. The authors develop different theoretical and empirical works in which imagining, planning, anticipating, remembering and acting are put in relation with crucial moments of human existence, as early as birth and even after death. The proposal of this volume emerged during a “kitchen seminar” session at the III International Seminar of Cultural Psychology in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil, 2017). The debate revolved around the imaginative capability of human beings and the possibilities to investigate this phenomenon in a new key. The awareness that an innovative theoretical and empirical contribution was needed to the understanding of imaginative phenomena in everyday life led to the proposal of the book From Dream to Action: Imagination and (Im)Possible Futures. The book aims to talk to different audiences: psychologists, sociologists, artists, teachers and healthcare professionals, addressing a variety of life experiences - such as imagining alternative futures when facing a terminal illness, an adoption, a transplant waiting list, or the choice to give up your musical instrument - mobilize multiple dimensions of human psyche, from the basic emotions to the more sophisticated higher mental functions. The constant effort is to understand the psychological and sociocultural dynamics of each event, and to contribute to the understanding of human imagining in the area of semiotic-cultural psychology, dialoguing with contributions from all the human and social sciences.

This book advances our theoretical understanding of the human experience. By overcoming dualities such as the relationship between reflection and action, it allows a more in-depth analysis of how concepts constitute complementary parts of the complex human thinking to be developed.

Presenting texts written by leading philosophers and psychologists, it provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of theoretical elaboration, which is then used to discuss the place and value of reflection in moral and epistemic scenes. These topics are accessible to experts and young scholars in the field alike, and offer scope for further reflections that could improve our understanding beyond the existing models and “-isms”.

The novelty of the book is in the dialogue established between several perspectives (e.g. philosophers and psychologists; Europe, America and Asia; etc.). The contributions of philosophers and psychologists establish a fruitful dialogue, so that readers realize that disciplinary divisions are overcome through dialogue and the common object of inquiry: the way human beings reflect and act in their everyday experiences.