A volume in Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology
Series Editors Brady Wagoner, Aalborg University, Nandita Chaudhary, University of Delhi
and Pernille Hviid, University of Copenhagen
Cultural Psychology studies how persons and social-cultural worlds mutually constitute one another. It is
premised on the idea that culture is within us-in every moment in which we live our human lives, in the
meaningful worlds we have created ourselves. In this perspective, encounters with others fundamentally
transform the way we understand ourselves. With the increase of globalization and multicultural
exchanges, cultural psychology becomes the psychological science for the 21st century. No longer can we
ignore questions about how our cultural traditions, practices, beliefs, artifacts and other people constitute
how we approach, understand, imagine and remember the world. The Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in
Cultural Psychology series aims to highlight and develop new ideas that advance our understanding of these issues.
This second volume in the series features an address by Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie, which is followed by commentary chapters and their
response to them. In their lecture, Zittoun and Gillespie propose a model of the relation between mind and society, specifically the way in which
individuals develop and gain agency through society. They theorise and demonstrate a two-way interaction: bodies moving through society accumulate
differentiated experiences, which become integrated at the level of mind, enabling psychological movement between experiences, which in turn
mediates how people move through society. The model is illustrated with a longitudinal analysis of diaries written by a woman leading up to and
through the Second World War. Commentators further elaborate on the issues of (1) context and history, (2) experience, time and movement, and (3)
methodologies for cultural psychology.