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For many years, for many people social psychology has been deemed a discipline in crisis.
This new book proposes a way out of the crisis by letting go of the idea that psychology needs new foundations or a new identity, whether biological, discursive or cognitive. The psychological is not narrowly confined to any one aspect of human experience; it is quite literally everywhere.
The book proposes a strong process-oriented approach to the psychological, which studies events or occasions. Aspects of experience such as communication or embodiment are treated as thoroughly mediated - the product of multiple intersecting relationships between the biological, the psychic and the social. The outcome is an image of a mobile, reflexively founded discipline which follows the psychological wherever it takes us, from the depths of embodiment to the complexities of modern global politics.
List of contents
The First Word Or In the Beginning Is the Middle
Whitehead and Process
Serres and Mediation
Luhmann and Communication
Artaud and Embodiment
Spinoza and Affect
Bergson and Memory
Foucault and Subjectivity
Deleuze and Life
On Losing Your Foundations and Finding Them Again
About the author
Paul Stenner is Professor of Social Psychology at The Open University, UK. He completed his PhD at the University of Reading, UK, and has held posts at the University of Brighton, University College London, University of Bath, and the University of East London. He works with process approaches to psychosocial issues. He has published work in numerous fields including the emotions, human rights, quality of life, and active ageing. With Simon Watts, he is the author of Doing Q Methodological Research: Theory, Method and Interpretation (SAGE, 2012). He has published 25 peer-reviewed articles using, or about, Q methodology and numerous book chapters, including Q methodology (Stenner, Watts, & Worrell, 2017) and The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology, Second Edition (Willig & Stainton Rogers, Eds., 2017).
Summary
Social psychology has been deemed a discipline in crisis. This book proposes a way out of the crisis by letting go of the idea that psychology needs new foundations or a new identity, whether biological, discursive or cognitive.
