A sociocultural psychology of the life-course

It was a pleasure and honour to be invited to present my work at the British Psychological Society’s Developmental Psychology Section and Social Psychology Section Annual Conference 2015, and I here thank the organisers for this kind invitation. I was particularly happy to intervene under this double auspice, as I believe that it is not only theoretically relevant to articulate developmental and social dynamics – I also believe that it is the only way we can address current human and societal challenges as psychologists. In this paper, which is very close to the lecture I gave, I first go back to the link between social and developmental psychology, before sketching a sociocultural approach of the life-course. I then argue that, in order to understand human specificities, we need not only to understand the many social spaces and places through which people move and act, but also, the places of memory, dreams and imagination through which they wander. I finally present two current research topics, before coming back to some implications of my propositions.