de Saint Laurent, Constance

2019, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Wagoner, B, Zadeh, Sophie

2018-3-2, de Saint Laurent, Constance

History abounds in everyday life: it is in the discourse of the politician who makes a patriotic use of World War II, in the epic movie of medieval inspiration, in the latest museum opening in town, or in the magnet on your fridge that makes a humoristic use of advertisement posters from the fifties. What tools can help us understand how history is used in these contexts and with what purposes? And, more importantly perhaps, how to understand the effects these uses have on us? To answer these questions, this paper proposes to develop a framework to study the uses of collective memory in everyday life. After a short review of the history of collective memory, the concept of memory act is outlined, based on three theoretical traditions: James’ pragmatism, Austin’s speech acts and Mead’s social acts. They are used to argue that everyday usages of collective memory are better understood as inter-subjective and discursive acts that are part of larger activities. Finally, some of the consequences of this theory are discussed.

2018, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Zittoun, Tania, Wagoner, B

This chapter explores the transformation of autobiographical memory in life transitions. To do so, it proposes a model of autobiographical memory as an oriented sociocultural act, whereby the person imaginatively distances herself from past experiences to produce a meaningful discourse on her past. This model is applied to the development of autobiographical memory during adolescence, a crucial period in this regard, and is used to analyze a series of longitudinal documentaries on teenagers in Switzerland. Based on two case studies, it is argued that adolescents learn to make sense of their past by building on previous recalls of their experiences, successively reworking their interpretation of what happened. As they discover new concepts, interlocutors, and cultural tools, they learn to distance themselves from their experiences to produce stories that are meaningful for their present selves, which they can share with others, and that can be turned into lessons to be learned.

2017-6-1, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Bresco de Luna, I., Awad, Sarah, Wagoner, B

The past has never been as relevant for the present as it is in today’s Post-truth world. Not just because many of our political leaders are promising to bring us back to a past that never existed – the Great America of Trump, the Lost Empire of Farage or the French Resistance of Le Pen – but because it seems more and more likely that they are bringing us back to the past as it actually happened – a past where populism successfully brought nationalist leaders to power. In this context, it seems particularly crucial to understand how we relate to our history, how we learn from it and the consequences it may have for the world we live in. These are the questions this special issue explores by adopting a cultural psychological perspective on collective memory – the lay representations of history – and proposing both theoretical and empirical contributions. In this editorial, we will try to first make the case for the political and social importance of collective memory. Second, we will argue why theoretical discussions – not just empirical research – are necessary to tackle these issues. Third, we will discuss the role we believe cultural psychology should play in the current context and the dangers of turning it into a field disconnected from social and political realities. Finally, we will present the contents of this issue and how we hope it tackles some of the problems raised in this editorial.

2018-9-29, Glaveanu, Vlad, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Literat, Ioana

There are many dimensions to the ongoing European refugee crisis, including economic, political, and humanitarian. Underlying them, however, is the issue of self–other relations and, in particular, the ways in which Western societies construct images of otherness, defined in cultural, religious and political terms. Since many participants in these debates have never actually interacted with refugees, their reactions to the crisis are often infused by emotion and fueled by a form of imagination that carries political consequences. At the core of this political imagination, we propose, are certain understandings of refugees, of how they think, feel, and intend to act. In other words, more or less explicit processes of perspective taking are at play in audiences’ responses to refugees. In this article, we aim to unpack the social and psychological mechanisms involved in taking the perspective of refugees on digital platforms using the Commitment Model of Perspective Taking (CMPT). Specifically, since online media is a key channel for sharing views about refugees, our focus here is on refugee-related Internet memes shared on Reddit, and the conversations around these visual artifacts. Our findings indicate that participants in these forums most often construct the perspective of refugees from an outside position, based on a commitment to difference, and rarely try to identify with the situation of refugees. We then discuss the ways in which these forms of perspective taking stimulate or hinder reflexivity and contribute to a political imagination that is open to otherness and tolerant of diversity or, on the contrary, fearful and prejudiced towards refugees.

2018, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Obradovic, Sandra, Carriere, Kevin, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Obradovic, Sandra, Carriere, Kevin

2018, de Saint Laurent, Constance, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Obradovic, Sandra, Carriere, Kevin

In this chapter I look at the links between collective memory and the imagination of collective futures. Drawing on works on imagination and autobiographical memory, I first discuss the role of past experiences in imagining the future. I then explore the consequences of such a perspective for collective memories and collective futures, which will lead me to argue that the former provides the basis for the latter. Three case studies are presented, each illustrating a different type of relation between collective memory and collective imagination: 1) collective memory as a frame of reference to imagine the future; 2) collective memory as a source of experiences and examples to imagine what is likely, possible or desirable; and 3) collective memory as generalisable experience from which representations of the world – Personal World Philosophies – are constructed and in turn used to imagine the collective future. This will lead me to the conclusion that representations of the world are characterised by “temporal heteroglossia”, the simultaneous presence of multiple periods of time, and that they mediate the relation between collective memory and collective imagination, allowing us to “think through time”.

2018-8-29, Glaveanu, Vlad, de Saint Laurent, Constance

2018, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Zittoun, Tania

Le sens commun dicte que nous, individus et collectifs, devrions apprendre du passé pour éviter de répéter les erreurs que nous avons pu commettre. Malheureusement, les recherches sur le sujet ont plutôt démontré le contraire : notre mémoire collective, c’est-à-dire nos représentations de l’histoire, a tendance à présenter une version de l’histoire à la fois biaisée, glorifiante, et unilatérale qui reflète nos intérêts nationaux et sociaux. Cette thèse a pour but de dépasser cette conception de la mémoire collective et d’explorer comment exactement les gens construisent, mobilisent, transforment et questionnent les représentations de l’histoire. Pour ce faire, une perspective socioculturelle est adoptée, qui considère que personnes et cultures sont interdépendantes, que le soi et l’autre sont co-constitués et que la personne est un agent qui se développe tout au long de la vie. A partir de cette approche, quatre études sont construites – trois études empiriques et une étude transversale. La première porte sur la construction de la mémoire collective dans les interactions, à travers l’analyse de débats parlementaires sur l’immigration. Dans la deuxième étude, les trajectoires de vie d’intellectuels et d’artistes qui ont remis en question des représentations historiques dominantes sont reconstituées, pour explorer comment la mémoire collective se développe au cours de la vie. Dans la troisième recherche, une expérience dialogique est utilisée, où les participants sont confrontés à divers discours sur un évènement récent (le conflit en Ukraine qui a débuté en 2015), pour analyser comment ils raisonnent sur l’histoire. Enfin, la dernière étude, transversale, analyse comment la mémoire collective est mobilisée pour imaginer le futur et représenter le monde. A partir de ces quatre études, il est conclu que les représentations historiques sont des ressources symboliques dynamiques, construites dans les interactions et tout au long de la vie, à travers l’utilisation de ressources sociales et culturelles et d’une multitude de processus psychologiques, dans le but de donner du sens au monde. Et donc que la question n’est pas tellement ce que nous apprenons du passé, mais comment nous l’apprenons. It is common wisdom that we, both as individuals and as members of societies, should learn from the past in order to avoid repeating the mistakes both us and others have made. Unfortunately, research on the topic has shown that we do quite the contrary: our collective memory, or our lay representation of the past, tends to present a rather biased, glorifying, and unilateral version of history and to reflect our national or social interests over the ones of others. The aim of this thesis is to go beyond this conception of collective memory, and to explore how exactly people construct, mobilise, transform, and challenge representations of history. To do this, I propose to adopt a sociocultural perspective, that considers culture and minds as interdependent, self and other as co-constituted, and the person as agentic and developing throughout the life-course. Based on this approach, four studies are proposed – three empirical and one transversal. In the first study, I look at how collective memory is constructed in interactions by analysing the transcripts of parliamentary debates on immigration. In the second study, I reconstruct the trajectories of intellectuals and artists who came to question hegemonic historical representations, to explore how collective memory develops over the life course. In the third study, I analyse how people reason about a recent event – the Ukrainian conflict that started in 2015 – and history through a dialogical experiment where people were confronted to diverse representations of history. Finally, in a last transversal study, I look at how collective memory is mobilised to imagine the future and represent the world. This leads me to conclude that historical representations are dynamic symbolic resources, constructed in interactions and developed throughout the life-course, through the use of social and cultural resources as well as a wide range of psychological processes, in order to give meaning to the world. And thus that the question is not what we learn from history, but how we learn from it.

2018, de Saint Laurent, Constance, Glăveanu, Vlad, Wagoner, B, Bresco de Luna, I., Glăveanu, Vlad

What does psychology have to offer to the pursuit of actualised democracy? Starting from the assumption – that we share with Moghaddam – that psychology has an important role to play in this regard, we propose to develop a cultural psychological perspective on the topic. To do so, we first revisit four common assumptions about democracy through the lens of cultural psychology. We then present the notion of political imagination as a tool to unpack how (the democratic) self, others and societies are imagined and constructed in discourse. We apply this notion to a series of four examples stemming from the on-going refugee crisis, and we illustrate how the psychological categories proposed by Moghaddam can be used to defend a vision of society that excludes others. Finally, we turn towards the concept of perspective taking, and we conclude that psychology’s contribution should focus on self-other relations – not just on the idealised, democratic self – as these are simultaneously political, psychological and ethical.