Communication and the microgenetic construction of knowledge
Date
2015Publisher
CUPPlace of publication
CambridgeSource
The Cambridge Handbook of Social RepresentationsPages
113-127Google Scholar check
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I've always said that social psychology was responsible for the study of communication and ideological phenomena and I think that when studying representations, we are actually studying communication. Serge Moscovici, 1995 Moscovici's words in the epigraph to this chapter suggest that the study of social representations involves the study of communication, and this is in itself one of the main aims of social psychology. This chapter focusses on a discussion of the microgenetic construction of knowledge, which will hopefully clarify the role of communication in social representations processes and will provide an exploration of the dynamics of social representations – a rather overlooked topic in social representations theory. I will start with a short genealogy of the notion of microgenesis in social developmental psychology and will then focus on how microgenesis has been conceptualized by Duveen and Lloyd (1990) in the context of a genetic social psychology. A specific line of research on the microgenes is of knowledge from this theoretical perspective is then presented (Duveen and Psaltis, 2008; Leman and Duveen, 1999, Psaltis and Duveen, 2006, 2007; Psaltis, Duveen and Perret-Clermont, 2009), and the implications of the findings are discussed for the theoretical notion of cognitive polyphasia and an understanding of culture and heterogeneity from a social representations perspective. Microgenesis: the genealogy of a powerful idea The origins of the idea ofmicrogenesis can be traced back to the 1920s and the work on Aktualgenese by Sander, Krueger and Werner (Catán, 1986; Valsiner and Van Der Veer, 2000; Wagoner, 2009b). They studied the evolution of percepts over time through the operation of lawfully organized mental activity. Werner was actually the first to use the term ‘microgenesis’ in the English language, in 1956. For Werner, it referred to ‘any human activity such as perceiving, thinking, acting, etc. as an unfolding process, and this unfolding or “microgenesis”, whether it takes seconds or hours or days, occurs in developmental sequence’ (Werner, 1956, p. 347). © Cambridge University Press 2015.