Jytte Susanne Bang

Nothingness and the human umwelt: a cultural-ecological approach to meaning.

In the paper I argue that the great impact of empiricism on psychology and the enclosed dualist agenda traps psychological phenomena into subjectivism. By discussing the phenomena of nothingness in biological and cultural life it is argued that meaning must be considered as a phenomenon that represents both a fit and a misfit of the individual with the environment. By stressing the overall presence of nothingness phenomena it is argued how the reduced ontology of empiricism—and its blindness to relations and transformations out of which meaning grows—should be overcome. In human cultural life, transformations are constitutive and ongoing changes are being produced to make sure that continuity as well as discontinuity will happen. The analysis of especially one case—the removal of an Amish school after a shooting episode—serves to prove how meaning grows out of cultural processes as people produce their own conditions of life. From a cultural-ecological point of view, analyzing meaning at the level of individual phenomenology, hence, means analyzing the ‘total psychological situation’ (legacy of Kurt Lewin). This may for instance include analyzing how people live, what they consider important and worth preserving, what must be changed, what are their core values and how do institutional arrangements contribute to keeping up that which is valued or to changing that which is not, etc. Meaning may be viewed the lived-out experience—the domain of self-generativity in human life.

Synthetic Phenomena and Dynamic Methodologies

In this chapter, dynamic methodologies are viewed as empirically and theoretically informed tools which help the researcher to study developmental processes. Dynamic methodologies will be discussed from an ecological perspective, that is, by taking seriously the individual—environment reciprocity as the unit of analysis. This perspective brings into focus the issue of atomism/elementarism which assumes rigid distinctions between sensations, thoughts, and acts. Dewey (1896) already addressed the problem when he said that according to such assumptions, sensory stimulus, the central activity (standing for the idea), and the motor discharge (standing for the act proper) are three different kind of things.

Historicizing affordance theory: A rendezvous between ecological psychology and cultural-historical activity theory:

The aim of this article is to discuss how mutually enriching points from both affordance theory and cultural-historical activity theory can promote theoretical ideas which may prove useful as analytical tools for the study of human life and human development. There are two issues that need to be overcome in order to explore the potentials of James Gibson’s affordance theory: it does not sufficiently theorize (a) development and (b) society. We claim that Gibson’s affordance theory still needs to be brought beyond “the axiom of immediacy.” Ambivalences in Gibson’s affordance theory will be discussed, and we will argue for certain revisions. The strong ideas of direct perceiving and of perception–action mutuality remain intact while synthesized with ideas of societal human life. We propose the concept of the affording of societal standards to be a meaningful term in order to grasp the specific societal character of affordance theory.

Youth development as subjectified subjectivity - a dialectical-ecological model of analysis

The aim of this article is to shed light on how environmental standards in the life of youths influence the development of self. We propose the concept of ‘subjectified subjectivity’ to grasp these person-environment dialectics in a general form. By elaborating on these conceptual understandings of youth life, the article also seeks to understand young people from their own perspectives on life and from their developing life-perspectives, rather than from general categories. Based on one of the author’s data from her study of young people in their transition to (and through the first year of) high school, we carry out an analysis of a 16-year old high school student and how her approach to beer, to beer drinking as a part of Danish high school life-style, and to herself changes over time. We suggest a dialectical-ecological model to analyze the dialectical and synthetic movements over time of the girl and her environments.