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This book aims to bring to readers the author's elaborated focus on the dynamic process of sign emergence, use, fixation and un-fixation, and dismissal. Its uniqueness is in its reliance on the organizing limits of irreversible time that renders the meaning construction by human beings to be constantly open-ended to face the uncertainties of the immediate future.
This book emerged from a 9-month series of seminars at the Department of Semiotics at Tartu University in 2021-2022 as a Välis-Eesti Külalisprofessor, during which the linkages between semiotics and cultural psychology were scrutinized. In collaboration with doctoral students from various countries, the present SpringerBrief outlines the theoretical innovations that the author started during the seminars but completed in the two years after their end.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Time and signs.- Chapter 2. The dramatic nature of human being. .- Chapter 3. The Wobbly semiosphere.- Chapter 4. Wandering Signs: Beyond linearity to synthesis.- Chapter 5. Signifying Umwelts.- Chapter 6. The hierarchical dynamics of signs in action.
About the author
Jaan Valsiner, born in Tallinn, Estonia, is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology (since 1995) and Editor-In-Chief, Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science (Springer, since 2007). After working for over three decades in USA at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Clark University, he accepted in 2013 the position of Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark in collaboration with University of Luxembourg and Sigmund Freud Privatuniversität Wien in Austria and in Berlin. He focuses on theoretical innovation, with monographs The Guided Mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Culture in Minds and Societies (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), Ornamented Lives (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers, 2018) and Sensuality in Human Living (Springer, 2020). He has recently published a major theoretical treatise General Human Psychology (2021 by Springer) that would synthesize William Stern’s personology with his theory of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics.
Jaan Valsiner has been awarded major research prizes in Europe: the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017. As part of his credo for building psychology on an international and trans-cultural basis, he has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Since 2017 he is a Foreign Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.
