Compiled by Susan Hawes, PhD for the Clinical Psychology Department, Antioch University New England. Last updated on 11/12/2006
- Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought
Online resources, readings, people on the topic of contemporary philosophy. - Online Readings in Psychology and Culture
Center for Cross-Cultural Research Western Washington University Bellingham, Washington U.S.A.From the Introduction: “Welcome to a unique free textbook and website! Consisting of short chapters relating to many aspects of the interface between psychology and culture, Online Readings in Psychology and Culture is designed to be used by professors to supplement lectures and textbooks in any psychology course, or as the primary readings for courses in psychology and culture.” - Front-Line Care Providers’ Professional Worlds: The Need for Qualitative Approaches to Cultural Interfaces
Hong, Gui-Young (2001, September).Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research
[On-line Journal], 2(3).Abstract: This paper re-conceives the professional worlds of health and mental health care providers from cultural perspectives and argues that individual providers live (professionally) at the interface between multiple personal, professional, and organizational cultures. It also argues that qualitative methods afford services researchers better opportunities to describe the cultures and characterize their interfaces. A conceptual discussion of psychiatric nurses’ professional worlds in the interfaces among nursing and psychiatric medical cultures as well as organizational culture is presented. Qualitative analysis of 25 individual psychiatric nurses’ written comments on their professional work and lives in public sector mental health service agencies are discussed. - Discerning the Dialogical Self: A Theoretical and Methodological Examination of a Nepali Adolescent’s Narrative
Skinner, Debra; Valsiner, Jaan & Holland, Dorothy (2001, September). Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 2(3).Abstract: Mikhail BAKHTIN’s ideas of heteroglossia, voice, utterance, and dialogism are important theoretical concepts for investigating relations between social and personal facets of human development, especially the development of identity or self-understandings in cultural worlds. Yet methodological and analytic procedures for discerning voices in individuals’ self-representations are relatively unexplored. In this paper, we discuss how BAKHTIN’s ideas can be used in a type of narrative analysis that focuses on the construction of individual identity and positionality within cultural worlds. We use an empirical example from one Nepali adolescent’s narration of self, collected as part of an extensive ethnographic study in a rural community in Nepal, to illustrate the conjunction of theory and method in discerning how individuals orchestrate the voices from their cultural and social worlds to create distinctive images of self and to envision their (future) social positions. Our examination of this narrative indicates that self processes orchestrate and transform social voices for past, present and future forms of self-understandings and cultural meanings. The primary foci in this paper are the theoretical concepts, methods and analysis that aid the researcher in discerning and understanding these voices and their
orchestrations. - Narratives of Possibility: Social Movements, Collective Stories, and the Dilemmas of Practice
by Joseph King. Paper for Delivery at the New Social Movement and Community Organizing Conference, University of Washington School of Social Work, November 1-3, 1995Abrstract: This paper, uses narrative, with its power to bring meaning to the otherwise random assaults of daily life, as a conceptual entry point into the practices through which people make choices, shape action, and create social movements. Social movements, I will argue, are constituted by the stories people tell to themselves and to one another. They reflect the deepest ways in which people understand who they are and to whom they are connected. Whatever they are, and whatever historical sources of their development, they are constructed from the interweaving of personal and social biographies– from the narratives people rehearse to themselves about the nature of their lives. One unhappy consequence of this for practice, however, is that social movements are not now and were never as subject to direction and control as most of the discourses concerned with them once assumed. - THE ACTION TURN: Toward a Transformational Social science
Reason, P., & Torbert, W. R. (2001). Toward a Transformational Science: a further look at the scientific merits of action research. Concepts and Transformations, 6(1), 1-37.Abstract: “This article offers an epistemological basis for action research, in order to increase the validity, the practical significance, and the transformational potential of social science. The article starts by outlining some of the paradigmatic issues which underlie action research, and argues for a “turn to action” which will complement the linguistic turn in the social sciences. Four key dimensions of an action science are discussed: the primacy of the practical, the centrality of participation, the requirement for experiential grounding, and the importance of normative, analogical theory. Three broad strategies for action research are suggested: first-person research/practice addresses the ability of a person to foster an inquiring approach to his or her own life; second-person research/practice engages a face-to-face group in collaborative inquiry; third person research/practice asks how we can establish inquiring communities which reach beyond the immediate group to engage with whole organizations, communities and countries. The article argues that a transformational science needs to integrate first- second- and third-person voices in ways that increase the validity of the knowledge we use in our moment-to-moment living, that increase the effectiveness of our actions in real-time, and that remain open to unexpected transformation when our taken-for-granted assumptions, strategies, and habits are appropriately challenged. Illustrative references to studies that begin to speak to these questions are offered.” - The Radical Psychology Network
“Seeks like-minded psychologists and others to help create a society better able to meet human needs and bring about social justice. We want to change society’s unacceptable status quo and bring about a better world. And we want to change the status quo of psychology, too. We challenge psychology’s traditional focus on minor reform, because enhancing human welfare demands fundamental social change instead. Moreover, psychology itself has too often oppressed people rather than liberated them.” - Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Mission Statement: “PsySR uses psychological knowledge and skills to promote peace with social justice at the community, national and international levels. Through our Action Committees and Steering Committee we work to:- Apply the growing body of knowledge about conflict resolution and violence prevention.
- Facilitate positive changes for victims and survivors of personal, community, and civil violence.
- Advocate for basic human needs – including actions that decrease poverty, ensure ethnic and gender equality, increase work opportunity, promote healthy and sustainable environments, and achieve a wiser balance between human needs and military budgets.
- Ensure that relevant information from psychology is used in local, national, and international public policy.”
- Psychologists Acting with Conscience Together (PsyACT)
“Psychologists, counselors, and other concerned citizens around the world act together to address issues that affect individual and community well-being through letters to editors, campus actions, teach-ins, & community activities.” PsyACT is currently working to help organize Local Action Teams. Other resources offered are:- Poverty Action Resources
- Child Abuse Action Resources
- Mental Health and Economic Justice Resources
- Economic Apartheid Action Center
- Moving Ideas Action Center
- Counselors For Social Justice
Mission Statement: Counselors for Social Justice is a community of counselors, counselor educators, graduate students, and school and community leaders who seek equity and an end to oppression and injustice affecting clients, students, counselors, families, communities, schools, workplaces, governments, and other social and institutional systems. CSJ is committed to:- Challenging oppressive systems of power and privilege. Implementing social action strategies including the Social Justice Advocacy Competencies through collaborative alliances with other ACA entities, counselor education programs, and N-16 schools and community organizations.
- Disseminating social justice scholarship about sociopolitical and economic inequities facing counselors and clients/students in schools and communities.
- Maintaining an active support network online and in person for engaging in social justice activities in schools and communities.
- Providing lively professional development to enhance counselor, counselor educator, and graduate student competency in social justice advocacy via ACA annual conference programs (Day of Action/Day of Learning), branches, regions, counselor education programs, N-16 schools, and community agencies.
- Maintaining social justice advocacy resources online.
- Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, & Violence: Peace psychology division of the American Psychological Association Division 48
- to encourage psychological research, education, and training on issues concerning peace, nonviolent conflict resolution, reconciliation, and the causes, consequences and prevention of war and other forms of destructive conflict
- to provide an organization that fosters communication among researchers, teachers, and practitioners who are working on peace issues
- to apply the knowledge and the methods of psychology in the advancement of peace, non-violent conflict resolution, reconciliation, and the prevention of war and other forms of destructive conflict
- New Social Movement Network
“From the action project recommended at the windup of the New Social Movement Theory and Practice Conference held at Garfield Community Center in Seattle, WA Nov 1-3, 1995, comes the New Social Movement Network (NSMNet) of which you are invited to become a subscriber. At the conference windup, we considered the problem of poverty as a project and conceptual lens to link with new social movement theory and practice –
using the network as a medium for dialogue across space. Further, we recommended a broad call for narrative using, as a reference for developing stories of social justice work, Joe Kling’s 1995 paper “Narratives of Possibility: Social Movements, Collective Stories, and the Dilemmas of Practice.” Examples mentioned were case material on how to do new social movement practice, stories of organizing, and using both tales from the field and from the classroom and weaving them to other relevant literature.”
Goals of the Division 48:
