Citizen City
Between constructing agent and constructed agency

Vasi van Deventer, Martin Tere Blanche, Eduard Fourie and Puleng Segalo  (Eds.)

Captus University Publications, ISBN 978-1-55322-164-7 (2007)
406 pages, 730 g, 7 X 10, $49.95 (US$49.95)

Citizen City brings together some of the best contemporary works on the interplay between subjectivity and society. The product of an ongoing international collaboration among theoretical psychologists — now spanning more than two decades — Citizen City tackles the difficult theoretical questions often avoided by practitioners and researchers. These questions are concerned not only with the fundamental nature of psychological objects such as self, society, culture, and race, but also — and perhaps more importantly — with how these objects are constructed by the scientific methods deployed to ‘discover’ them.

Rather than the usual thematic organisation of chapters, Citizen City is structured as a play in five acts. Each act presents a key episode in the unfolding story of how we find ourselves up against, but also intimately entangled with, the disciplinary, moral, and technological apparatus of the 21st Century.

The chapters included in this volume were all developed from papers presented at the 11th biennial conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, held in Cape Town, South Africa, in June 2005.

Table of Contents   top

Acknowledgements

The play

Jane Cherrington
Reflecting on the ISTP conference 2005: A small drama in ten short scenes

W. J. Roper
Psychological approaches to dramatisation and its uses

Ioannis Lambrou
Theorising male castration fear in film through Herakles

Calliope Rigopoulou
Gazes in dialogue and conflict: Narcissus, Perseus, Demeter

Joan Hambidge
If you meet the Lacanian Buddha on the road, kiss him

The quest of the norm

Martina Tißberger
The project(ions) of ‘civilisation’ and the counter-transferences of whiteness: Freud, psychoanalysis, ‘gender’, and ‘race’ (in Germany)

Frances Cherry & Cathy McMillan
South Africa through the lens of Gordon Allport

Carita McCallum
On the politics of the empowered woman: An act of violence?

Henderikus J. Stam & Tanya Kalmanovitch
Animals, children, and other species: Constituting psychological categories one instrument at a time

Irmingard Staeuble
Entangled in the Eurocentric order of knowledge: Why psychology is difficult to decolonise

Martin Morf
Toward a more relativist story of human origins

Cor Baerveldt
Cultural psychology as the study of normative experience

Eri Park
Psychological aspects of cosmopolitanism

The siege

Dimitris Papadopoulos & Niamh Stephenson
Travelling experience: Rethinking the limits of empirical evidence in social science

Linda Eskell-Blokland, Terri Bakker, Willem Louw, Ilse Ruane & Gerhard Viljoen
Indigenous psychology in the making: The ghetto is in the eye of the beholder

Line Lerche Mørck
Young ethnic minorities in education: How to expand possibilities for learning and transcending marginalisation

Andrea Kleeberg-Niepage
Is there a childhood for children who work? Child labour and the Western construction of childhood

H. Lorraine Radtke & Janneke van Mens-Verhulst
A feminist perspective on the use of self-regulation theory in health psychology

Verdie M. Dreyer
The premise of non-locality

Ole Dreier
Generality and particularity of knowledge

Rose Capdevila
I did it my way: The implications of methodological choices in critical work

Lars Allolio-Näcke
The foundation myth of cultural psychology

A (secret) agent

Maurice Schouten
The flesh and bones of cognition: Against Cartesian psychology

John Cromby
Feelings and embodied subjectivity

Clifford van Ommen
Damasio’s subject: A constructionist self in contemporary neuroscience?

Huib Looren de Jong
Folk psychology: Between hermeneutics and reduction

Wolfgang Maiers
Psychological and neuroscientific perspectives on human intentionality and action: The controversy about ‘free will’

Christopher Peet
Beyond Foucault: Tradition and agency

Athanasios Marvakis
The utopian surplus in human agency: Using Ernst Bloch’s philosophy for psychology

Jeff Sugarman
John Macmurray’s philosophy of the personal and psychological reality

Kurt Dauer Keller
Pre-personal identity: A critique of Harré’s notion of a singular self

Piet Kruger
What is the problem of consciousness?

A new practice

Erik Axel
Knowing and praxis

Arnd Hofmeister
Eating machines: Lines of flight in the apparatus of health

F. J. A. Snyders & E. du Preez
Cybernetic symphony: Patterns of organisation in interpersonal systems

Kate Grieve
The (de)construction of validity of neuropsychological assessment measures

Paul N. Thomas
Psychological consulting in South Africa: The emergence of a new practice modality and its implications for training

Lise Bird Claiborne
Exploring ‘figuration’ as a theoretical construct: Mobilising Deleuze, Guattari, Braidotti, and Haraway with education professionals

Judy Brown & Lloyd Strickland
Activity theory in the field of human–computer interaction

 

Contributors

Index

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