Papers on Social Representations (PSR) is an international journal dedicated to furthering the theoretical and methodological development of the Theory of Social Representations and its application, as well as of related theorethical and methodological approaches in the social sciences and the humanities. Social Representations Theory was first proposed by Professor Serge Moscovici in 1961 and is now a major theoretical perspective within Social Psychology. As such it develops a theory of social cognition, culture and communication connecting knowledge practices, identity processes, psychological processes, ideology and social change. In 1999, Papers on Social Representations became accessible online with the financial support of European Commission - D.G. XXII - CDA "European Doctorate on Social Representations and Communication" and Johannes Kepler Universität Linz. PSR publishes original papers that advance the understanding and application of Social Representations Theory and commensurate ideas and epistemologies. The journal publishes papers across an expansive array of topics with a focus on theoretical critique and debate, methodological integration and innovation, and theoretically driven research from a diverse range of approaches and methods. Drawing together researchers from around the world, PSR fosters a community of scholars working within Social Representations theory and related fields. The journal regularly invites the submission of special issues. If you are interested in proposing a special issue, please contact directly the editors at susana.batel@iscte-iul.pt and s.caillaud@univ-lyon2.fr . PSR publishes two issues per year, every six months, in June and December. PSR is an Open Access Journal published by: Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal (2018 - ) Department of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK (2009 - 2017) Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria (1992 - 2009) PSR is committed to guarantee publication ethics and prevent publication malpractice. The responsibilities of PSR’s editors, reviewers and authors concerning publication ethics are described in the PSR’s Guidelines on Publication Ethics (see the 'Submissions' section). Scimago Journal Citation Reports © Ranking: 2022: 185/297 (Social Psychology, Q3) / Impact factor: 0.37 Listed by EBSCO Publishing ISSN 1021-5573 (Print), ISSN 1819-3978 (Online)
University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL)
(Un)walkability, local identity and otherness: perspectives from the production of group mental maps in a peripheral area of Mexico City
This article looks at the production of symbolic boundaries in San Gregorio Atlapulco, an ancient village located in a peripheral area of Mexico City that is undergoing major urban change and environmental predation. It presents the point of view of inhabitants who claim to be ‘natives’ of San Gregorio, taking as its angle of approach their pedestrian mobilities and the social representations expressed in these practices. These representations are identified from mental maps produced in workshops with groups of residents. The article examines the relevance of mental maps for understanding the representations deployed in a practice as versatile as walking, and the relevance of the representational approach for understanding what ‘really’ happens in everyday interactions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Papers on Social Representations
The Ego-Alter-Object Relationship in the Lived Environment: The case of the Inhabitant, the Garbage Collector, and the Representation of the Sidewalk Through the Prism of Waste
This text is a reflection on the article “The sidewalk, waste and garbage collection: practices and representations of an ‘in-between place’” by Lusson & Breux, seen from the angle of the tripartite ego-alter-object gaze proposed by Moscovici. This framework enables us to explore the relationships between these three elements in understanding the “sidewalk” as a social object. After outlining the aims of the article and the concepts used to achieve them, an analysis is proposed on the role of social representations of the sidewalk in the issues of spatial appropriation and social struggle. This analysis leads us to reconsider this geographical work within the framework of social and environmental psychology, introducing new theoretical perspectives on socio-spatial segregation and socio-cognitive representations.
The sidewalk, waste and garbage collection: practices and representations of an “in-between place”
The aim of this article is to grasp the nature of the representations generated by the sidewalk and to understand how they relate to the work of the garbage collector. Viewing the sidewalk as a place of various expectations reflected by its design, this article analyzes the way in which the representations of the sidewalk do or do not convey expectations of garbage collectors, and how garbage collectors are working with these expectations. Using a methodology that mixes press review and in situ observation, this article shows that the sidewalk is an “in-between-place” that is constantly being redefined. For residents, it is both an appropriated and a rejected place at once as well as a place of control, particularly over the work of garbage collectors. For the latter, the sidewalk is the site where most of their work invariably takes place, yet where that same work is undermined and frustrated with constraints. The challenges encountered by garbage workers consist in large part of the constraints posed by contemporary street furniture.
Living by the Sea. International and Intergroup Comparisons of Socio-spatial Representations of this “Life Territory”
The article sets out to study socio-spatial representations of seaside areas using an international and intergroup approach. Specifically, we have attempted to identify forms of appropriation of place and their contribution to the process of identity construction. Research was carried out in France and Iceland. Despite the differences in geoclimatic conditions and lifestyles of local populations in these two countries, they share a strong sense of attachment to the sea and coast. In order to study socio-spatial representations, a qualitative survey (semi-structured interviews and cognitive maps) was conducted with 48 inhabitants. The interview guide focuses on four themes relating to respondents’ life territories: representation of the life territory, individual personal history, elements of change, and relationships between individuals or groups. Evaluation grids were constructed to process the maps manually and analyse the comments made during the interviews. The findings show predominantly cartographic representations. However, there was a significantly greater number of these representations in France than in Iceland, where other forms of spatial representation of the territory were also observed, thus suggesting a different relationship to space. Furthermore, these representations of territories varied according to the origins of the respondents (native to the area, non-native to the area) as is evidenced by the drawings. These contrasts reflect different cultural representations of the territory stemming from a different relationship with time and space.
The Social, Symbolic and Imaginary Dimensions of Spatial Representations
This introduction presents spatial representations as social and symbolic constructs informed by everyday practices, social relationships and cultural contexts. Initially studied from a bio-physical and cognitive angle, these representations have been increasingly subjected to a socio-spatial approach that emphasizes the meanings social groups attribute to places. This body of research, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, draws on the social representations paradigm, combined with ethnographic approaches featuring socio-spatial representations. Far from simple mental representation tools, the maps used by these researchers play a central mediating role, enabling the exploration of collective memories, social identification processes and inter-group relationships. This interdisciplinary framework is used to analyse and understand individuals’ relationships to their surroundings, often in connection with current social and environmental concerns, shedding light on the ways in which groups construct and share the spatial, identity and symbolic meanings of their relationships to the places where they live.
social, symbolic and imaginary dimensions of space
Book Review. Perret-Clermont, A.-N. Morerod, J.-D. & Blanc, J. (Eds.) (2022). Cultures et guérisons. Éric de Rosny, l’intégrale. Paris : Livreo-Alphil.
Copyright (c) 2024 Papers on Social Representations
Social Representations as Cognitive-Emotional Processes: Examining Individual Tensions
We tested key predictions of a recent theoretical model positing social representations (SRs) as cognitive-emotional processes. The study aims to investigate how emotional experience initiates the dynamics of an SR object, paying particular attention to the role of tension in these dynamics. This attempt seems crucial as SRs are essential to the construction of social knowledge. The study of the impact of emotional experience on the dynamics of SRs could thus be a way to provide some support to the original assumption in Social Representations Theory (SRT) that SRs are dynamic objects of social change. One hundred and thirty management students had to recall highly positive and negative emotions immediately after participating in a three-day teamwork situation. Having previously identified students’ (gendered) SRs of teamwork, the study examines individual tensions following emotional experience, i.e. the cognitive impact of the nature (positive or negative) of emotion on the clarification of the SR object. Highlighting the fundamental role of the meaning-generative function of SRs, the results showed variation in SRs dynamics of teamwork depending on the valence of emotion, the status of SR components, and gender as a sociocultural variable. We interpret gender variations in SR dynamics of teamwork following emotional experience as reflecting social positioning vis-à-vis a shared cultural reality. Our findings are discussed considering the support they offer to the model, how the nature of emotions can produce contrasting SRs dynamics and suggested theoretical implications about the place that should be given to emotions in SRT.
Socio-professional Representations of Paramedical Students Regarding Their Future Profession
The phenomenon of specialization among nursing categories can lead to difficulty in constructing a common professional identity and generate issues of professional adaptation. This study aims to explore the socio-professional representations of paramedical students and compare these representations among two categories of students. The research targets students from two programs: "nursing care" (n= 562) and the second "healthcare techniques" (n=133). Regarding the theoretical framework, this study uses the structural approach of social representations. Data are collected through free and hierarchical associations, analyzed through prototypical analyses, similarity analyses, and a Chi-squared test. The results emphasize heterogeneous representations, with shared elements and others specific to each group. Nursing students characterize the nursing profession as laborious and stressful. Nurses are described as autonomous individuals demonstrating professional values and interpersonal qualities. For students in the healthcare technicians' group, the representation focuses primarily on clinical practice concepts. The hospital appears, for this group, as a privileged environment for care practice. It is therefore incumbent upon various stakeholders in the nursing education field to consider the representative structures held by students in the course of their training and to implement strategies to minimize potential representational divergences. Keywords: Socio-professional representation; paramedical professions; education; free and hierarchical associations; training.
From cosmological breakthrough to normalised disease
Studies on the social representations of Covid-19 can make important scholarly and practical contributions such as favouring the understanding of social thought about the emergence of a pandemic and its impacts on different groups and providing insight for the planning of communication about health and health education. Longitudinal studies on the social representations of infectious diseases are scarce. The present study is a longitudinal investigation of the social representations of Covid-19 constructed by middle-class Brazilian adults. We conducted semi-structured interviews with seven participants at three different moments during the pandemic, April-May 2020, September 2020, and May-June 2021, totalising 21 interviews. We analysed the textual data with the Top-Down Hierarchical Classification provided by the software Iramuteq. The results show that participants initially represented Covid-19 as a radical transformation of the world based on spiritual, divine, or teleological explanations. With time, these beliefs became less prominent and the participants represented Covid-19 as a normalised disease with specific symptoms. Science-based beliefs became more prominent with time. We discuss this transformation in the social representations of Covid-19 based on the articulation between social representations and social practices. We also discuss the othering process as a constant feature of the investigated representations and ideological implications of this process.
Covid-19, social representations, longitudinal study, Iramuteq, cognitive polyphasia, social practices
A Dignified Judge’s (Re)Presentation of Self
Goffman (1959) believes that everyone is a performer, maintaining a “front” depending on social situations they enter. Roles with higher level of institutionalization, such as judges, may even have front prepared for them, may it be by law or social expectations. The role of a judge as prepared by the law entails the performance of dignity. Goffman believes that a person’s front is collectively represented, and that this representation becomes a fact of its own right. We use the social representations approach (Moscovici 1961) to explore this “collective representation” of the judge’s dignity among practicing lawyers, using hierarchical evocation method (Abric, 2005). This paper explores the performative dimension of a judge, a character in a performance of a trial. We report our findings and discuss the front of a dignified judge that emerged as a persona with specific appearance and manner, and setting used to objectify the judge’s dignity.
Social media networks and the networks of meanings as imaginings of the Cyprus problem: A study on the use of images on Twitter in the Cyprus peace efforts
The article investigates images in communication processes as manifestations of social representations. Focusing on the conflict-affected society of Cyprus, it studies the images used in 76250 tweets related to the Cyprus problem during the intensification of the negotiations in the period between September 2016 – July 2017. Through social network visualisation we identify the most prominent images used to construct meaning about the Cyprus problem as well as the clusters created through the image tweeting. The results show that most of the images tweeted about the Cyprus problem are institutionalised manifestations of social representations that contribute to meanings that are not conducive to the peace process in Cyprus. They instead enhance the social imaginary of Cyprus being determined by a loop of unsuccessful peace efforts that are always distant from the grassroot of society and by the concept that a solution will arrive to Cyprus as an external force sourced from the political elites.
Femininity in Superhero Comics: a study of social representations
The visual image has been largely taking up the means of communication of postmodernity as an important communicational resource. By the same token, the theory of social representations (TSR) has assumed a privileged place in the study of mass communication, to grasp the relationship manners socially shared by subjects about determined objects. The goal of this research is to present a methodological composition with a visual image analysis that can be useful in the field of research about TSR. To this end, we regained the analysis of visual content through an associative model of Variables and Values, linking it to the premises of Barthesian semiotics, attesting that they are complementary methods. This methodological composition was applied to investigate the femininity representation in superhero comics, through the image of Wonder Woman. The results show the reaffirmation of traditional values naturalized in the representation of femininity, exhibiting only a few (and momentary) changes over the years.
The power of the image: the role of social representations
The theory of social representations has offered a significant and nuanced theoretical framework to gather and interpret knowledge across a wide range of subjects and mediums in order to discuss how different social and material contexts are perceived for the purpose of providing a meaningful foundation to a given reality. The theory has been critiqued and expanded hugely to provide a rich source of intellectual enquiry within social psychology and beyond. However, one area that has received scant attention, is the significance of graphic imagery as a source of data from which to explore social representations within the public consciousness. As imagery in media and social media has become an extension of perceptions of a given social reality, this special issue aims to fill this gap to explore how the power of the image can reflect the diffusion of social representations across our often politicised social and cultural worlds.
Memes as Images that Envisage Social Representations in Social Media.
In recent years, the study of social representations through images, icons, drawings, and the like, has attracted the attention of researchers interested in analyzing the role visual devices play in the elaboration and interpretation of Social Representations and Social Imaginary. Along the same lines, in this paper we study some visual elements that can provide relevant information for exploring and reconstructing social representations. These visual units are called Memes “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual Internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process” (Shifman, 2013, p. 367); they generate and shape the mindsets and significant forms of behavior and actions of a social group. Memes spread a particular idea as presented in images, animated GIFs, videos, written text, or some other units of cultural practices. They give rise to the materialization of the expression of a given social reality within which individuals and social groups live which is why we consider them as useful tool for communicating and reconstructing social representations. During the COVID-19 confinement, many internet memes circulated but we decided to study those on remote learning and teaching since education in that period was a great challenge. The corpus of study was gathered by manually tagged searches on social media such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter using the following hashtags: #virtualeducation, #remoteteaching, #pandemicandschool. The internet memes analyzed show the difficulties students faced when they were confronted with remote teaching and the emotional states they experienced. These expressions and meanings allow us to reconstruct the social representation they have of this modality of teaching.
Faces of Citizenship: A social representational inquiry to understand how citizenship as social imagery is described in Turkey
Reflecting on the legal relationship between the individual and the nation-state, citizenship has long been considered a framework consisting of rights and obligations. However, in the last two decades, it has become intertwined with individuals’ meaning-making processes of their social world as well as with the dynamics of constructing group boundaries and (re)producing the hierarchies between groups. In this paper, we will present how the lay representations of citizenship prevailed on social media through publicly sharing visuals after the issuance of an amendment for a regulation stating the new conditions for granting Turkish citizenship to foreigners. After thematically analyzing the tweets containing visuals with hashtags related to citizenship, which were sent within the six months following the amendment, we extracted two main themes of citizenship in Turkey as "legal boundaries" and "sentimental citizenship". The study enabled us to show how visuals are used to communicate the social and political aspects of citizenship that are represented around objective and subjective meanings while also indicating how the lay meanings of citizenship are utilized to reproduce the inequalities.
Exploring images of otherness through cinema: Analysis of counter-visualities in Portuguese films
In the contemporary context, where cultural flows intensify, studies on images of otherness can play an important role in reflecting on imaginary dimensions of social representations, as well as in contesting the multiple axes of exclusion. Cinema can be a privileged arena for such studies, as it is situated between the plural universes of media and art, reflecting and often anticipating the trends of its time. In this paper, we analyse the role of cinema as a space for the construction, reproduction, and (re)construction of social representations of identity and migratory experiences. We performed an exploratory analysis of all publicly funded film production in Portugal from 2018 to 2022. In the 359 film synopses analysed, the absence of important terms such as “racism” or “social discrimination” stands out, even in films that address displacement experiences and inclusion difficulties. However, we identified counter-hegemonic images and narratives among the productions, especially considering identity representations. Three films were selected for in-depth analysis: Fruit of Thy Womb, by Fábio Silva (2021); Bustarenga, by Ana Maria Gomes (2019) and Nha Sunhu, by José Magro (2021). In the analyses, we discussed the “language of images” and how the productions portray issues such as intercultural and intergenerational dialogue, gender stereotypes and racism, considering factors such as distance, angle, and gaze. We highlight the importance of greater visibility for films like these, capable of expanding the discussion of important social issues and combating the asymmetric circulation of stories and memories, a crucial factor for social change.
Social Representations of Istanbul: Socio-Spatial Analysis via Visual and Verbal Techniques
The aim of this study is to examine how Istanbul is represented visually and verbally adopting the approach of Social Representations. A field study was carried out with 158 undergraduate students in Istanbul. A questionnaire form was administered in the first stage of study including questions about the demographic characteristics of participants, and their metaphors about Istanbul. The drawings as a visual technique were used in the second stage. The results were analyzed by inductive content analysis. The prominent themes in drawings were grouped as ‘panorama of Istanbul,’ ‘problems of Istanbul,’ and ‘behaviors and appearances of residents in Istanbul.’ The results of metaphor analysis revealed the following salient themes: ‘contrasts,’ ‘diversities,’ and ‘problems.’ The social representations of Istanbul are influenced by its socio-cultural diversity, spatial properties, historical background, problems, people’s daily activities there.
The power of the image and the role of social representations in iconographic reproduction: the pink triangle
The following study explores the narrative following the pink triangle within queer history as a political symbol and its resulting evolving social representation. First used within Nazi Germany and later reclaimed by social movements, it is now used today often within the creative reproduction of professional and novice artists. A mixed methodology was evoked to observe several instances of iconographic reproduction of the pink triangle across myriad mediums of artistic creation from couture to body art. These examples originate exclusively from WEIRD English-speaking countries. This preliminary explorative analysis of social representations within these uses instilled the processes of anchoring and objectification which hold major roles in the construction and ongoing development of social representations. This analysis suggests the major events that give the pink triangle meaning are integral to the identity of the queer community where its use in artistic creation is important for how queer individuals navigate the world and their place within it.
The right to stay: Exploring graffiti and street art as political representations against touristification in Lisbon
Tourism has increased significantly in Southern European cities, with it radically altering central urban neighborhoods and communities’ lives into tourism commodities that often lead to the (in)direct physical and psychological displacement of dwellers. Whereas social sciences’ research has already started to give voice to the psychosocial impacts of this touristification problem, not much attention has yet been paid to how individuals and communities attempt to contest it. Graffiti and street art are forms of political participation that have been traditionally neglected as communicative and citizenship practices by Political and Social Psychology. In this paper, we will contribute to this research agenda by considering graffiti and street art as representational projects, that reflect, propose and negotiate meanings in the public sphere. Through a wandering ethnography, 19 images of ilegal and legal graffiti and street art that directly or indirectly referred to tourism were collected during 2018-2019 in Lisbon historic touristified neighborhoods. The images were then analyzed using Pragmatic Discourse Analysis. Analyses revealed two main themes, on ‘Contesting Touristification’ and ‘Discussing the housing crisis’ and a set of associated subthemes. These reveal that meanings of place as community and as a right, and the relations between touristification, the housing crisis and social justice, are brought to the public space through graffiti and street art by resorting to culturally relevant symbols and associated identities. This research shows graffiti and street art as ways of re-presenting touristification and the housing crisis in Lisbon that contribute to politicizing these issues in Portugal.
Lexical Worlds Travelling in Translation
Literary texts have recursively encountered social psychology and related disciplines, particularly in theoretical frameworks that focus on meaning-making such as the social representations perspective. The present study explores the relationships between text and context in a collection of short stories published in different languages: Women with Big Eyes by Ángeles Mastretta. The ouvre was examined using lexicometric analyses, i.e. Reinert’s Descending Hierarchical Analysis, in order to identify emerging worlds of meaning. From the three analysed versions (the original Spanish, the Italian, and the English translation), different lexical worlds are identified that likewise recreate the general idea of the book. However, interesting variations in meaning-making emerged, as grounded in specific cultural and linguistic contexts. The results appear to legitimise the use of literary texts in social psychological analyses, also in their translated versions, although with some caveat. The paper closes underscoring the importance of studying meaning-making in context, thus enhancing the potential of literary texts for research in social psychology and in related fields of knowledge.
Copyright (c) 2023 Papers on Social Representations
Network Analysis of Social Representations for Community Detection
This article proposes a new approach to the study of social representations which aims at studying them from the perspective of network analysis and graph theory. To do so, we consider networks integrating both the constituent elements of the representations (opinions, beliefs) and the individuals who adhere to these elements or are bearers of them. In this perspective, a representation network is presented as a set of nodes (opinions, beliefs, individuals) and links (the adherence of an individual to an opinion is considered as a link between this individual and the opinion to which he adheres). This procedure allows us to apply the algorithms developed in the field of network analysis for the detection of communities to the studied representation network. Three studies illustrate the proposed approach by showing that it makes it possible to identify the heterogeneity or homogeneity of a group interviewed during a social representation study.
Social Representations of (Im)migrants in the First Year of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Brazil: A Study of Online News
Interested in dialogical and modelling approaches to social representations and communication dynamics, we investigated social representations of (im)migrants constructed in a period and context of intense social vulnerability, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil (February to December 2020). We explored media communication not simply as the unidirectional transmission of collective beliefs to the Brazilian public, but as social representations co-constructed by citizens and expressed in the comments that they posted on social media. We collected data online and constructed two textual corpora. The first corpus included 134 news articles selected with the search terms ‘immigrants’ or ‘refugees’ and ‘Covid-19’. The second corpus included 1295 comments written by the readers of the mentioned articles and posted on the newspapers’ Facebook pages, which we considered a special interactive space for expressing, sharing, and co-constructing social representations. We analyzed the data using the Descending Hierarchical Analysis and Similarity Analysis provided by the software IRaMuTeQ. The results show social dynamics of argumentative polarization about (im)migrants framed in the geo-political Brazilian context at the time of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our case study exemplifies how a context of crisis can reinforce the polarization of existing social representations of (im)migrants in Brazil. We discuss this polarization as an ‘echo chamber’ of informational polarization and fake news contributing to misinformation about Covid-19 worldwide, showing how political decisions may increase xenophobia or facilitate social dialogue. Keywords: Social representations, covid-19; immigrants; Brazil; online newspapers; Facebook.
Social representations, covid-19; immigrants; Brazil; newspapers; social media.
More than a Common Place: A Social Representations Approach to the Internet
This article aims to investigate the common sense knowledge about the Internet across social groups from the perspective of social representations theory. We inquired 1013 participants (students, teachers, and guardians) from three schools, using the ranked association technique, the General Internet Attitudes Scale and the Web-Use Skill Measure Index. Prototypical and textual correspondence analysis were run on the verbal data. Results showed that the Internet’s representation vary across social groups, being organized along a media-message axis and a personal-social axis. While students, participants with lower education level and positive attitudes toward the Internet have a personal media usage representation, teachers and participants with higher education levels showed a greater focus on the social message. The study is significant because it shows that the Internet is still not consensual, suggesting a connection with social identity that future research should explore to better understand and bridge digital divide.
Social representations of Intensive Care Unit as held by ICU patients´ families: the life-death thema
This paper discusses the findings of a socio-psychological qualitative study that examined the social representation that families of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients share about the ICU and the antinomic themes that constitute this representation. The sample consisted of thirteen people, eleven women and two men whose family members had been hospitalized in ICUs and had recovered or they were still being treated in an ICU during the interviewing period. Semi-structured interviews were conducted focusing on individual and family experiences of the ICU. The transcribed interviews were analysed quantitatively using thematic analysis. ICU representation was structured around both negative and positive themes and specifically the ICU representation was articulated around the antinomies of security/precariouseness and proximity/distance that were subsumed in the life/death thema. The implications of this representation for the support of ICU patients’ families and communication with the ICU patients and staff are discussed.
Copyright (c) 2022 Papers on Social Representations
Power, nothingness and the social construction of knowledge
In SRT, nothingness is the presence of the rejected meaning, it is a crack in the positivity of SR, its "dark side"; while meanings are rejected to delegitimise the social order. It is the product of a constructive activity of a social group. The absent, as what is repressed being unacceptable, is always present even if it is not 'seen', even if it is not 'said'. In this way, SRT is compatible with nothingness, because it presupposes a construction, dynamic relations between presence and absence, even leaving room for resistance. However, a problematisation of nothingness can be opened up by critically explicating the (usually implicit) ontological and epistemological assumptions that condition the research. Dans la TRS, le néant est la présence du sens rejeté, il est une fissure dans la positivité de la SR, son côté « sombre », tandis que les significations sont rejetées pour délégitimer l'ordre social. Il est le produit d'une activité constructive d'un groupe social. L'absent, comme ce qui est réprimé étant inacceptable, est toujours présent même s'il n'est pas " vu ", même s'il n'est pas " dit ". De cette façon, la TRS est compatible avec le néant, car elle présuppose une construction, des relations dynamiques entre la présence et l'absence, laissant même place à la résistance. Cependant, une problématisation du néant peut être ouverte par l'explicitation critique des hypothèses ontologiques et épistémologiques (généralement implicites) qui conditionnent la recherche.
Social Representations as Cognitive-Emotional Processes: An Integrative Approach Proposal
One of the main focuses of the theory of Social Representations (SRs) consists of examining its sensitivity to context immediacy. Arising from everyday life, emotions could be particularly relevant to this aim as they could constitute modalities through which SRs can emerge, be reinforced, or be transformed. The inherently unstable nature of reality requires a signaling system of this variability. The general assumption is that emotions provide, at an individual level, a signaling function of the relevance of SRs in the social integration of reality. Triggering this signal function, the role of tension lies at the heart of the process. With the emotion-driven tension, we approach SRs as cognitive-emotional processes of construction, conservation, and transformation of social knowledge. We, therefore, situate the study of the relationships between SRs and emotions in a conceptual approach to the dynamics of stability and change. Considering SRs as dynamic objects of social change, this article proposes to conceptualize SRs as cognitive-emotional processes by promoting an integrative model grounded on a socio-constructivist as well as a discursive perspective. In this model, emotions are addressed as individual dispositions at the service of the sociogenesis of SRs. Occurring from individual experience, they contribute through their sharing to the construction of social knowledge. Implications of this conceptual proposal for SR theory are discussed.
Social Representations, Emotions, Social Sharing of Emotion
Diffusion, Propagation, Propaganda: And Then Came Effusion. A New Mode of Communication for Social Representations
The advent of the internet and information and communication technology marked a radical shift in how people communicate. Moscovici (1995) highlighted that this new reality produced representations with their own logic and style, but did not envisage that they would have their own metasystem and a new mode of communication that will subsequently be referred as effusion. Effusion shares some common features with rumour: information transmitted between receivers and sources with interchangeable positions and, therefore, equivalent statuses. It is however different and cannot be likened to rumour because the relations between receivers and sources, which are both specific and general, are predominantly virtual. Our analysis shows that effusion differs from the Moscovici’s three classic modes of communication (diffusion, propagation and propaganda; see Moscovici, 2008), in terms of target audience, objective, and function. Although it may appear to be informative, what it actually does is to activate a cognitive modality different from opinion, attitude, or stereotype that corresponds to specific behavioural modalities required by the metasystem. The impact of effusion on social representations is discussed.
The text examines a forgotten public debate between Serge Moscovici and Pierre Bourdieu which was held in Paris in 1982 on account of the former’s book, “The Age of the Crowds”. The interest if not the actuality of the debate resides, as it is attempted to show, in the inherent boundaries and underlying disciplinary ambiguities which pervade the field of social sciences as in the case here between social psychology and sociology. At the time the encounter concluded, a truce between the two parties had not yet been achieved.
Agnotology: a new field for the study of social representations
The emergence and spread of a new disease, Covid-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has had considerable social effects. Such a movement of opinion was favoured by the initial weakness of scientific knowledge, whether it concerned the origin of the virus, its effects or its diagnosis and treatment, for which containment was the first collective protection measure, before vaccination. This kind of phenomenon has taken on such a dimension that it is relevant to refer to an emerging research trend in the social sciences: agnotology or the study of ignorance.
Collective Memory: Objectification or Anchoring?
Collective memories are shared representations of a group's past, based on a common identity. In this short commentary, based on two examples from previous research, I reflect on the tension between two approaches to collective memories: a neo-Freudian approach according to which the past weighs on the present; and a neo-Durkheimian approach according to which the present weighs on representations of the past. The theory of social representations can account for both aspects through the processes of anchoring and objectification. Because they are anchored in pre-existing social representations of the group's past, and because they objectify the present concerns of group members, despite their frequent historical inaccuracy, collective memories convey a truth that deserves to be taken seriously.