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THE VIRTUAL FACULTY

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This 'virtual faculty' began to form in late 1994. As faculty members we share a sufficient common interest to have enabled us to come together in this networked forum nearly one year later. Perhaps the 'key plank' in our common interest is what has been termed 'the discursive turn' (aka 'the second cognitive revolution') that has begun to occur in a number of areas of contemporary psychology. What is this 'discursive turn'?

Our delineation of the subject matter of psychology has to take account of discourses, significations, subjectivities, and positionings, for it is in these that psychological phenomena actually exist. For example, an attitude should not be seen as a semipermanent mental entity, causing people to say and do certain things. Rather, it comes into existence in displays expressive of decisions and judgements and in the performance of actions. Each reconceptualization helps to draw attention to the fact that the study of the mind is a way of understanding the phenomena that arise when different sociocultural discourses are integrated within an identifiable human individual situated in relation to those discourses
(Harré and Gillet, 1994: 22).

This common interest is represented in different ways in the work of individual faculty members. The faculty members are at the same time jointly working to realise some shared projects within this computer-based medium. One practical application of this common interest animates the emerging field of narrative therapy.

Contributing Faculty Members

Michael Bamberg	Lawrence Berg	Michael Billig	Luis Botella	Nancy Budwig
Daniel Chandler	Michael Cole	Jeanne Curran	Bronwyn Davies	David Epston
David Gauntlett	Kenneth Gergen	Mary Gergen	Rom Harré	Vincent Hevern
Andrew Lock	Ian Parker	Joseph Petraglia	Jonathan Potter	Lois Shawver
	John Shotter		James Wertsch

Projects

'Finding a home-base'
Teaching and/through Research: Proposed Academic Programme
Academic Discussion Groups
Works-in-Progress and Projects

• 1. Work-in-progress: Prologue to the process of social construction
  
• 2. The Embarrassment Project
• 3. The Vygotsky Project
• 4. The Virtual Faculty Project
• 5. Alternative Media for Communicating
• 6. Theoretical Resources for Narrative Therapy.
• 7. Draft outline for a course on 'Identity and Self'
• 8. The Quote Screensaver

A related project is Daniel Chandler's work centred in The University of Wales at Aberystwyth, the Media and Communications Studies Page. This has been described by Connect (Fall 1995 issue), the journal of the Center for Media Literacy, Los Angeles, as 'perhaps the most comprehensive media lit site. Overflowing with links to media lit articles, research, educators, organizations, industries, advocates, etc. Subjects include communication theory and visual literacy'.

A second related project is being developed by Joseph Petraglia at Georgia Institute of Technology. First, web-based resources for the study and teaching of rhetoric are being put in place; and second, a collaborative project there is working to put in place software to support constructivist learning.

A third related project is 'Dear Habermas', being developed by Jeanne Curran at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

A fourth related project is Vinnie Hevern's Resources for Narrative Psychology, which focuses upon narrative perspectives in psychology and allied disciplines and provides an interdisciplinary guide to bibliographical and Internet resources concerned with "the storied nature of human conduct" (Sarbin, 1986) broadly conceived.

And a fifth related project is Lois Shawver's Postmodern Therapy News, a regularly updated newsletter, background and compilation of current discussions on the Postmodern Therapy mailing list.

Papers Available

Note:

Michael Bamberg

• Language, Concepts and Emotions
• Affirmation and Resistance of Dominant Discourses
• Why young American English-speaking children confuse anger and sadness: a study of how anger develops in practice.

Mick Billig

• Freud and Dora: repressing an oppressed identity.
• The Dialogic Unconscious: psycho-analysis, discursive psychology and the nature of repression

Luis Botella

• Constructivism and narrative psychology
• Qualitative analysis of sef-narratives: A constructivist approach to the storied nature of identity (Luis Botella, Sara Figueras, Olga Herrero, & Meritxell Pacheco)
• Changes in self-construction over the course of constructivist psychotherapy: A case study using repertory grid and self-characterization (Meritxell Pacheco & Luis Botella)
• NEW! Clinical psychology, psychotherapy, and mental health: Contemporary issues and future dilemmas
• Personal construct psychology, constructivism, and postmodern thought
• Personal construct psychology, constructivism, and psychotherapy research
• Personal construct psychology in a changing Europe: From the matrix of decision to multiphrenic identity NEW!

Nancy Budwig

• Language and the construction of self: Developmental reflections

Daniel Chandler

• Semiotics for Beginners

Mike Cole

• The world beyond our borders: What might our students need to know about it?

Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré

• Positioning: The discursive production of selves.

Ken Gergen

• Social Psychology as Social Construction: The Emerging Vision
• Psychological Science in Cultural Context
• Narrative, Moral Identity and Historical Consciousness: a Social Constructionist Account
• The Ordinary, the Original and the Believable in Psychology's Construction of the Person
• Is Diagnosis a Disaster?: A Constructionist Trialogue
• When Relationships Generate Realities: Therapeutic Communication Reconsidered
• Constructionist Dialogues and the Vicissitudes of the Political
• Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics
• Social Theory in Context: Relational Humanism
• Organizational Science in a Postmodern Context
• Technology and the Self: From the Essential to the Sublime
• Technology and the Transformation of the Pedagogical Project
• Who Speaks and Who Replies in Human Science Scholarship?
• The Place of the Psyche in a Constructed World
• Toward a Cultural Constructionist Psychology
• The New Aging: Self Construction and Social Values
• Writing as Relationship
• La Terapia Como Una Construccion Social Dimensiones, Deliberaciones, y Divergencias
• The Poetic Dimension: Therapeutic Potentials
• Psychological Science in a Postmodern Context
• Movimento do Construcionismo Social na Psicologia Moderna

Rom Harré

• The rediscovery of the human mind.
• Nagel's Challenge and the Mind-Body Problem.
• Social constructionism and consciousness
• Theoretical Psychology NEW BOOK
• Massey Seminars, September 2005: Draft orientation papers
  • Positioning Theory
  • Thinking with Models

Andy Lock

• Against cognitivism: the discursive construction of cognitive mechanisms.
• A framework for understanding 'selves'.
• On the recent origin of symbolically-mediated language and its implications for psychological science.
• The role of gesture in the establishment of symbolic abilities: continuities and discontinuities in early language development.
• Narratives and infancy
• Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution.
• Human nature, learning and mind
• Preverbal communication
• Phylogenetic time and symbol creation: where do ZOPEDS come from?

Tim McCreanor

• Mimiwhangata: Media reliance on Pakeha commonsense in interpretations of Maori actions

Johnathan Potter

• Post-cognitive psychology
• Discourse analysis and constructionist approaches: Theoretical background

The Public Conversations Project

• From diatribe to dialogue on divisive public issues: Approaches drawn from family therapy

Lois Shawver

• What is postmodernism and what does it have to do with therapy, anyway? NEW!

John Shotter

• Wittgenstein's world: Beyond the 'Way of Theory' Toward a 'Social Poetics'
• 'Now I Can Go On': Wittgenstein and Communication
• Talk of Saying, Showing, Gesturing, and Feeling in Wittgenstein and Vygotsky
• Vico, Wittgenstein, and Bakhtin: 'Practical trust' in dialogical communities
• Dialogical realities: The ordinary, the everyday, and other strange new worlds
• Living moments in dialogical exchanges
• Problems with the 'way of theory'
• Social construction as social poetics: Oliver Sacks and the case of Dr. P
• Social constructionism and 'providential dialogues'
• The social construction of our inner lives
• Toward a third revolution in psychology: From mental representations to dialogical social practices
• Life inside the dialogically structured mind: Bakhtin's and Volosinov's account of mind as out in the world between us
• Putting a (dialogical) practice into our practices...A whole new language-game for psychology
• Action research as history making
• Must we 'work out' how to act jointly
• Inside dialogical realities: from an abstract-systematic to a partipatory-wholistic understanding of communication
• Seeing historically: Goethe's and Vygotsky's 'enabling theory-method'
• Inside an external world
• Can subjectivity be theorized?
• The end of organizations and the emergence of self-developing, conversational communities.
• From within our lives together: the dialogical structure of our 'inner worlds'.
• Problems with the way of theory.
• Writing from within "living moments:" "withness-writing" rather than "aboutness-writing."
• Dialogue, depth, and life inside responsive orders: from external observation to participatory understanding.
• At the boundaries of being: Re-figuring intellectual life.
• Wittgenstein and his philosophy of beginnings and beginnings and beginnings. Paper given at the American University, Washington DC, March 26th 2000, at a Wittgenstein Conference in honor of Rom Harré.
• Wittgenstein and the everyday: from radical hiddenness to 'nothing is hidden'; from representation to participation (In Journal of Mundane Behavior).
• At the boundaries of being: re-figuring our intellectual lives together (Plenary speech at "Psychology 2000 - Congress," Joensuu, Finland, 30th August to 2nd September).
• Constructing 'resourceful or mutually-enabling communities: putting a new (dialogical) practice into our practices (Paper presented at the Presidential Session at the AECT Conference, Denver, Oct 25th-28th, 2000) (PDF format).
• Instead of theory critique and debate: Voloshinov's unending, dialogically-structured participatory mode of inquiry.

Jim Wertsch and Mike Cole

• The role of culture in Vygotskyean-informed psychology

Also see

• Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal Formerly, The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition

Editors: Michael Cole, University of California, San Diego; Yrjo Engestrom, University of California, San Diego; Susan Leigh Star, University of Illinois; James V. Wertsch, Washington University;

Abstracts of papers are available from Volume 1, 1994 to date

Links

At this point in this 'virtual faculty's' development there are lots of things we maintain an interest in. Not all of these are central to our academic interests. Some of our current interests are in things that are just the kinds of technological gizmos you might need if you want to try this exercise for yourself. But in terms of what we are trying to do, these things are just gizmos that help us to keep on trying. Please let us know of additional links we should list. Note also that these pages are in the process of construction, and some links will take you away from this site at what might be inappropriate times. So remember to use your 'back' button as needed until we sort out a better format.

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Comments to A.J.Lock@massey.ac.nz

Department of Psychology, Massey University , New Zealand

URL: http://www.massey.ac.nz/~ALock

last changed Tuesday, 29 May, 2001