People in transitions in worlds in transition: Becoming a woman during WWII
Social and psychological movement: Weaving individual experience into society
Sign the gap: dialogical self in disrupted times
In this article we propose to advance our understanding of dialogical self dynamics by focusing on the experience of time. In order to do so, we treat the dynamics of I-positions as semiotic processes. We focus on an event that threatens the sense of time and causes uncertainty - World War II in England, examined through a case study of a young woman. We show how social and personal time markers normally establish a sense of continuity. Facing ruptures, a person can use further social means to reduce uncertainty - yet these carry normative expectations for I-positions. More personal uses of symbolic resources can also restore a connection to past I-positions, construct present ones, and create alternative future I-positions; they can also create alternative temporalities that enable to isolate or protect vulnerable I-positions.
Using Social Knowledge: A Case Study of a Diarist's Meaning Making During World War II
Integrating experiences: Body and mind moving between contexts
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 theorize a two-way interaction: bodies moving through society accumulate differentiated experiences, which become integrated at the level of mind. This enables 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.
Valences, traces and new synthesis in social representing. Commentary of J. Valsiner’s Creating sign hierarchies
Based on a chemical metaphor, Valsiner's (2013) model proposes to consider social representations as semiotic processes regulating developmental dynamic. In this paper I pursue this exploration by considering situations in which people's trajectories lead them to confront with conflicting social representations. Based on the two cases of young women's war experience, I suggest (i) that social representation have, for a given person, different "weight" than others, because they have longer story for him or her; (ii) that social representations might have positive or negative "valences", due to their emotional resonance; and that (iii) the existence of specific conditions of "natural laboratories" might help us to account for the processes by which people nonetheless engage into new forms of representing.