The Fifth Annual Niels Bohr Lecture in Cultural Psychology

Convener: Brady Wagoner

The Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology series aims to highlight and develop new ideas in cultural psychology. They are the main annual event of the Centre for Cultural Psychology at AAU, established in 2013 by the Danmarks Grundforskningsfond (Danish National Research Foundation). 

Each year early to mid career cultural psychologists, who have demonstrated originality and productivity, are selected to give the lecture. And other cultural psychologists, from around the world are invited, to attend and comment on it.

This year we are proud to present Steve Brown and Paula Reavey as our keynote speakers. Their talk is titled ‘Memory in the Wild: Life Space, Action, Setting'. The paper will be downloadable from this webpage in early January and the program will follow shortly afterward. In the meantime, the abstract is available here:

Steven D. Brown, University of Leicester & Paula Reavey, London South Bank University

Keynote Paper available here,

Ecological thinking forms a subterranean current within the history of psychology which arises at key moments. One comparatively recent example is with Ed Hutchin’s Cognition in the Wild, which offers an account of mediation and situated action that provides for a sociocultural reformulation of psychological processes. From the perspective of the psychology of memory, the challenge of this ecological thinking is to draw our attention to complex relations between practices of remembering and the settings in which they are enacted. In this paper we return to earlier examples of ecological approaches, such as Kurt Lewin’s Principles of Toplogical Psychology and JJ Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, to develop a conceptual framework of ‘life space’ which emphasises the relational and material grounding of acts of remembering. We argue for the analysis of remembering in relation to ‘setting specificity’, where what and how we remember is interdependent with the relational meshwork of the setting where it occurs. We exemplify this approach with a range of examples from recent empirical work in social welfare and mental health care practices. The cultural and historical dimensions of memory can then be situated within a broader account of ‘experience-ecologies’. We conclude with some reflections on the ethico-practical obligations which structure our professional engagement with these ecologies. 

Programme

Monday February 27

09.30-11.00: Niels Bohr Lecture: Steve Brown and Paula Reavey

11.00-11.30: Coffee

11.30-12.30: Commentary and Discussion: Tania Zittoun

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-14.30: Commentary and Discussion: Mariann Märtsin

14.30-15.00 Coffee

15.00-16.00 Commentary and Discussion: Lucas Bietti

16.00-16.15 Coffee

16.15-17.15 Commentary and Discussion: Cathy Nicholson

Tuesday February 28

09.30-10.30: Commentary and Discussion: Stéphanie Barros Coimbra, Isabelle Albert & Dieter Ferring

10.30-11.00: Coffee

11.00-12.00: Commentary and Discussion: Jana Uher

12.00-13.00: Lunch

13.00-14.00: Commentary and Discussion: Chiara Fioretti

14.00-14.30: Coffee

14.30-15.30: Commentary and Discussion: Sophie Zadeh

15.30-16.00: Coffee

16.00-17.00: Commentary and Discussion: Danilo Silva Guimarães