Memorials and semiotic dynamics

Three important themes recur in recent discussions in cultural and developmental psychology: How do ruptures and transitions allow us to identify processes of change? How can we observe the dynamics through which the social and the individual mutually construct each other? And how can individuals be seen as active constructors of meaning and their worlds, bridging their past to their futures? In her book Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Jenny Edkins addresses the societal world with very comparable questions. How do we identify the emergence of newness in the social and political world, and how can we guarantee spaces for its emergence? How can symbolic objects
both participate in the regulation of the social and the making of indi-
vidual fates? How can memories be integrated in the fabric of individual and collective changes, so as to allow both learning from the past and change for the future?