The collective making of a general psychology of culture

Abstract

For many years, we have been lucky to be part of seminars, workshops, and summer schools, guided by Jaan Valsiner. These arrangements have taken place all over the world and included scholars from all over the world. In this global nexus, participants had a degree of common general orientations and sometimes overlapping interests (e.g., education)-but this was not always the case. Each participant was most often committed to specific, yet different, problems of psychological kind. At the outset of joining these meetings, we thought, "How do we proceed in this multileveled variability-and how can knowledge be constructed through such practice?" This is what the chapter is about: How science constructs abstract knowledge for human practices, and how this production is embedded in the scientist's involvement in human practices. In this sense, the chapter aims to relate to meta-theoretical, theoretical, and practical levels in investigating what matters, when being de-and re-situated with one's research in mind. It is a tribute to Jaan's insisting on a particular idea of how to develop knowledge in practice. We understand it as a contribution to a practice-methodology of theoretical innovation.