Prof Sandra Jovchelovitch

This course is available on the MSc in Behavioural Science, MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Organisational and Social Psychology, MSc in Psychology of Economic Life, MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology and MSc in Social and Public Communication. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course focuses on societal thinking, exploring how knowledge and beliefs and develop, circulate, and change in public spheres. Through the study of concepts, empirical research and fields of application, the course examines how communities think and the psychosocial processes that regulate the development of lay knowledge and its encounter with other systems of thinking and knowing. Students are invited to reflect on social representations as both consensual and contested cultural tools that provide lenses through which humans understand, make sense of, and try to change the social worlds they inhabit.



Topics covered include 1) the socio-cultural psychology of representations and knowledge production; 2) origins and theoretical roots of social representations as situated and extended cognition; 3) power differentials between different forms of knowledge and cultural thinking; 4) processes and functions of social representation, including making sense of the new and unfamiliar, anchoring and objectification, semantic enablers and barriers, 5) the psychology of knowledge encounters,  epistemic justice and cognitive solidarity; 6) the transformation of common sense in contemporary societies vis-a-vis the encroachment of bureaucracies and artificial intelligence in everyday life.



These topics are examined through classical empirical studies and theoretical and applied debates that cover both majority world and western contexts.

15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the WT.

An essay plan of not more than 500 words is required.

G Sammut, E Andreouli, G Gaskell, and J Valsiner (Eds). Resistance, stability and social change: A handbook of social representations. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

S Moscovici, Social Representations: Explorations in social psychology. Polity Press, 2000;

S Moscovici, Psychoanalysis: its image and its public. Polity Press, 2008.

C Prado de Sousa and S E Serrano Oswald (eds) Social Representations for the Anthropocene: Latin American Perspectives. Springer, 2021.

S Jovchelovitch, Knowledge in Context: Representations, community and culture. Routledge, 2019 (Classicas Edition).

I. Markova,  The Dialogical Mind: Common Sense and Ethics. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

D Jodelet, Madness and Social Representations, Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991;

W Wagner and N Hayes, Everyday Discourse and Common Sense, Palgrave, 2005.

K Deaux & G Philogène, Representations of the Social: Bridging Theoretical Perspectives, Basil Blackwell, 2001.

A detailed bibliography is provided at the beginning of teaching.

Coursework (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.