Representing Development : The Social Construction of Models of Change

Representing Development presents the different social representations that have formed the idea of development in Western thinking over the past three centuries. Offering an acute perspective on the current state of developmental science and providing constructive insights into future pathways, the book draws together twelve contributors with a variety of multidisciplinary and international perspectives to focus upon development in fields including biology, psychology and sociology.

Chapters and commentaries in this volume present a variety of perspectives surrounding social representation and development, addressing their contemporary enactments and reflecting on future theoretical and empirical directions. The first section of the book provides an historical account of early representations of development that, having come from life science, has shaped the way in which developmental science has approached development. Section two focuses upon the contemporary issues of developmental psychology, neuroscience and developmental science at large. The final section offers a series of commentaries pointing to the questions opened by the previous chapters, looking to outline the future lines of developmental thinking.

This book will be of particular interest to child psychologists, educational psychologists and sociologists or historians of science, as well as academics and students interested in developmental and life sciences.

David Carré is PhD research fellow at the Niels Bohr Professorship Centre for Cultural Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, Aalborg University, Denmark.

Jaan Valsiner is Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology, Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark.

Stefan Hampl is Vice Rector for Teaching and Deputy Head of the Faculty of Psychology, Sigmund Freud University, Austria.