Product Description
Series Editors
Sergio Salvatore and Jaan Valsiner
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Rationale for the book series In the beginning of the 21st century, a new direction has been emerging at the intersection of developmental, dynamic and social psychologies, anthropology, education, and sociology—which has become labeled cultural psychology. This fits the vast global social processes of most countries becoming multi-cultural in their social orders, and the World becoming one “global village”—with the corresponding need to know how different parts of that “village” function. The knowledge base of contemporary psychology has become truly inter-disciplinary, and its applications in the vast variety of cultural contexts need to be informed about varieties of cultural expectations.
In that interdisciplinary synthesis, the knowledge base of contemporary psychology is increasingly international—while its applications in the various areas of social practices remain local. The proposed project is meant to create an international forum for communicating key ideas of methodology, different approaches to family, relationships, and schooling, and social negotiations of issues of human and development. New perspectives—dynamic systems theory, dialogical perspectives on the development of the self, the role of various symbolic resources in human development, new perspectives on psychotherapy, and other new topics of interdisciplinary kind will figure prominently in the book series. - Why a book series? In the world of vastly changing social sciences, much of the immediate scholarly exchange and negotiations about social practices are moved to the internet base, which changes the context for the traditional, paper-based, scholarly communication. However, together with the speed and efficiency of the new electronic medium comes its disadvantage—the lack of longevity of the intellectual traditions. The latter has been guaranteed by way of durable media—from clay tablets to paper—where the access to the sources has been limited only by the recipient’s psychological and physical capacities (literacy, storage and carrying capacity, etc.).
Since 1995, the Journal Culture & Psychology (by Sage, London) has created a similar niche for developing scholarship in an adjacent area—the up and coming field of cultural psychology. The audience of the Journal is wide—not limited to developmental researchers—but equally international and creative. Still, the Journal cannot do everything—it cannot maintain the focal, topical scholarship in the form that is concentrated within the same covers. Even topical/thematic issues of the Journal are not sufficient for that, as they do not circulate independently of the Journal. There is a need for an outlet of short single- or multi-authored monographs where the authors can outline their basic ideas in greater detail and longevity than in any journal format publication. The result of this reasoning was a book series Advances in Cultural Psychology: Constructing Human Development.—currently published by Information Age Publishers (starting 2005). Yet the series is inevitably linked with U.S. markets and does not cover the whole field of cultural psychology and its specific sub-areas.