Prof Sandra Jovchelovitch and Ms Sandra Obradovic

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 develop, circulate, and change in public spheres. The course examines ‘thinking societies’ and how they connect the individual with the world around them. The foundational theoretical concepts introduced in the course are utilized to understand key topics including 1) the role of stories and story-telling in development and sense-making, 2) the politics of knowledge production and cultural thinking, 3) the links between social representations, selfhood, identities and histories, 4) how we make sense of the unfamiliar and the implications of encountering difference, 5) the implications of the digital sphere for ‘thinking societies’, connectedness and cohesion, and 6) how societies establish links between common sense, knowledge and truth.

These topics are examined through classical empirical studies and theoretical and applied debates that cover both the 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 period between WT and ST.