This book illustrates the role of researchers’ affects and emotions in understanding and making sense of the phenomena they study during ethnographic fieldwork. Whatever methods ethnographers apply during field research, however close they get to their informants and no matter how involved or detached they feel, fieldwork pushes them to constantly negotiate and reflect their subjectivities and positionalities in relation to the persons, communities, spaces and phenomena they study.

The book highlights the idea that ethnographic fieldwork is based on the attempt of communication,...

Innovative research requires courageous methods. With this in mind, Courageous Methods in Cultural Psychology invites students and post-graduate researchers to develop methods that will let them grasp phenomena of interest more fully. Readers will learn how to use established methods, and may be asked to develop them further by combining single steps of extant procedures, or by taking a completely new approach to data collection and analysis. In this book, diverse researchers present projects in which they have tried to do just that. A comprehensive process — from narrowing down...

Liminality has become a key concept within the social sciences, with a growing number of publications devoted to it in recent years. The concept is needed to address those aspects of human experience and social life that fall outside of ordered structures. In contrast to the clearly defined roles and routines that define so much of industrial work and economic life, it highlights spaces of transition, indefiniteness, ambiguity, play and creativity. Thus, it is an indispensable concept and a necessary counterweight to the overemphasis on structural influences on human behavior.

This...

The “Re-Inventing Organic Metaphors for the Social Sciences” is a volume with the specific goal: to challenge psychological understandings by connecting psychological approaches with  multidimensional perspectives of various other scientific streams, meanwhile imbedding the generated knowledge in metaphors that allows researchers to follow  phenomena into a deeper and more (w)holistic understanding of its appearance. This is particularly important when the humankind faces challenges due to systemic biological changes, as the phenomenological dynamics bonded to those...

This book examines the theoretical developments in the field of Action Research from a historical perspective. The central focus of the investigation is the concepts of democracy and subjectivity as defined by the field’s various traditions. To address this issue, this book offers a thorough investigation of the theoretical and historical underpinnings of Action Research in order to argue that such a clarification allows for a transcendence of the distinction between theory and practice in political action. This transcendence will be achieved with the theories of the German critical...

This book is aimed at appreciating and further developing the work of Pina Boggi Cavallo. She was a scholar that fully embodied the spirit of the first cognitive revolution in psychology, whose ideal was to consider human being in its totality. The focus of scientific investigation in her work, were the processes of thought, as connected to the affective and ethical dimensions, the social construction of the developing Self within the real context of its making.

The book is organized in three sections:

1. Sowing: the selected works of Pina Boggi Cavallo translated in...