Luca Tateo

The Italian Extreme Right On-line Network: An Exploratory Study Using an Integrated Social Network Analysis and Content Analysis Approach

All over the world, extreme right activists and neo-nazis are using the Internet as a tool for communication and recruitment in order to avoid national laws and police investigations. The last 10 years have seen both the diffusion of CMC environments and the rise of extreme right movements in several European countries. This study investigates the structure of the Italian extreme right network, taking into account the latest trends in the social psychology of CMC to describe the nature of ties among Italian extreme right websites.

Toward a cogenetic cultural psychology

The dialogue between cultural psychology and phenomenological and semiotic philosophy seems to be extremely promising. I have tried to present some relevant aspects of this dialogue and to use them as cornerstones to elaborate a metatheoretical and epistemological discourse about the way of building and understanding concepts. Semiotic approaches show how humans, as meaning-making beings, experience the world in the form of totalities that emerge from primary distinctions in the continuum of experience. First, drawing on cogenetic logic, I argue that any epistemological model that aims to account for developmental processes must emerge from a triadic system, rather than following the procedures of a binary logic, in order to have any correspondence between concept building and phenomenological world in psychology. Then, I sketch an epistemological approach called method of complementary negation that could help cultural psychology to build more developmental abstract models of very concrete human phenomena.

A Tailorable Infrastructure to Enhance Mobile Seamless Learning

The widespread use of mobile devices is leading towards their adoption in the learning process, even if some pedagogical challenges are still not fully addressed when integrating mobile-assisted activities into regular curricula activities. In this paper, we first define some guidelines to design a general, tailorable, and platform-independent mobile learning system. Second, we present the aCME system, a mobile infrastructure, developed by adhering to the defined guidelines, to provide a general-purpose system, easy to start up with and friendly to user, and finally, tailorable, i.e., that can be easily adapted to the needs of different learning environments. The aCME system has been implemented as a Web-based architecture, to provide content and functionalities for different contexts, accessible from any location and by using any communication device. Finally, we describe a tool, deployed into aCME, that allows responding to quiz-based questionnaires during learning activities. A preliminary evaluation was performed to analyze usability and user satisfaction when interacting with the system we developed. The paper is concluded with some comments and future research directions.

The Dialogical Dance: Self, Identity Construction, Positioning and Embodiment in Tango Dancers

Argentine tango is a complex phenomenon, involving music, dancing and lifestyle, today practiced by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. This is already a good reason for psychology to make it an object of study. Besides, studying tango could also help to develop a dialogical way of theorizing and a dialogical methodology, taking into account both the genetic historical and eso-systemic dimensions and the individual experiencing. As any other product of human psyche, tango creates an universal and abstract representation of life starting from very situated and individual acts. Such institutionalized representation, which is at the same time epistemological, ethical and aesthetical, becomes a tradition -that is the framework distanced from the individual immediate experience- within which the meaning of the experiences to be make sense in return. To illustrate this epistemological and methodological stance, a history of the development of tango as dialogical social object first is sketched. Then, an ethnographic study about the Self actuation in a community of Italian tango dancers is presented. Results show how participants construct and actuate their identities in a dialogue between their I-positions inside and outside tango community.

Gulliver’s Eggs: Why Methods are not an Issue of Qualitative Research in Cultural Psychology

The future of qualitative methods regards the kind of object cultural psychology is interested and the kind of questions it can ask. I propose that the object should be experiencing, understood as a complex whole, consisting of lived-by action and counter-action, that is contextual inter-action with the world in the form of an experiencing subject and otherness. The kind of questions cultural psychology can ask is instead related to the epistemological status attributed to both researcher and participant. Probably few scholars such as Vygotsky, Piaget and Lewin understood to what extent experiencing is always changing, because the relationship between mind, alterity and culture is co-generative. This also implies a relativization and a decentralization of the psychology’s perspective. Finally, I provide some examples from the history of psychology and some suggestions to work at the level of such complexity by using methods that can work with complex objects such as products of human activity (e.g., art, literature, architecture, etc.).

Giambattista Vico and the psychological imagination

This special issue originates from an international workshop on “Vico and imagination,” that took place at Aalborg University in 2014, within a research project on Giambattista Vico and the epistemology of psychology. Imagination has inexplicably been relegated to the background in contemporary psychology, despite the fact that imaginative processes are involved in even the most mundane activities. In this editorial, I first present the rationale and the content of the articles and commentaries. Then I outline a brief history of the concept of imagination before Vico, drawing some consequences for contemporary psychology. Finally, I provide the proposal for a new research program on imagination as a higher psychological function that enables us to manipulate complex meanings of both linguistic and iconic forms in the process of experiencing.

Generalization as creative and reflective act: Revisiting Lewin’s conflict between Aristotelian and Galileian modes of thought in psychology

It is argued that generalization in psychology is a creative, interpretative, and reflective act of thought, by accessing a higher level of abstraction from meaningful events. In the context of clarification of this claim, a fresh look at Lewin’s argumentation about the “Aristotelian” and “Galileian” epistemologies will be useful. Lewin’s ideas illuminate the contemporary debate about individual cases, lawfulness, and theory in psychology. Finally, it is demonstrated how Lewin’s reasoning can still provide the ground for theoretical reflection in psychology. This science is indeed still facing some relevant epistemological problems, unwilling to abandon the essentialist and reductionist concept of the “average,” and confronting an equal challenge of achieving a scientific status without sacrificing its humanistic dimensions. Consequently, Lewin’s theoretical discussion on epistemology in psychology can provide a relevant starting point to foster contemporary reflexivity in psychology. Scientific method provides conceptual artifacts, constraints, and norms of sharing that enable this particular type of sense-making process.

Social Representations, Individual and Collective Mind: A Study of Wundt, Cattaneo and Moscovici

The paper presents a discussion on the role of Social Representations in the articulation between individual and collective dimensions of mental activity. An analysis of some concepts in the works of Wundt and Cattaneo is the starting point for a discussion of the relationship between individual processes, practices, artifacts, symbolic systems and functions of Social Representations in the development of culture and individuals. In this perspective, Social Representations could be considered a space of negotiation of the meaning. The relationship between Social Representations, symbolic systems, practices and sense making involves the elaboration of the tension between continuity and innovation, which is developed through communication and practice along time in the interaction between individual and collective minds.

Beyond the Self and the Environment: The Psychological Horizon

The horizon’s metaphor has been often used in literature, natural sciences, and philosophy as a catalyzer of the human aspiration to the Unknown. The chapter develops the idea of the psychological horizon, understood as one of the semiotic elements characterizing the relationship between the self and the environment. The psychological horizon is one of the catalytic factors enabling psychological events. Drawing from Kurt Lewin’s field theory, the chapter describes the features of the psychological horizon as a semiotic device and its role in the process of meaning construction. Through the idea of psychological horizon this reality-not-yet-to-be comes into our life, playing a role in setting up our goals through the imaginative power. The psychological horizon is the infinite realm of possibilities ahead of time yet to be semiotized, thus still partially socially unbounded, that is necessary as a reference point to the person’s widening of life space. The horizon/sign is the specific sign that, once produced, establishes the conditions for the psychological horizon to participate in the production of new psychological phenomena through the co-regulation of psychological processes. If the idea of the horizon/sign is well-founded, then the process of its production and the different types of horizon/signs could be studied in order to better understand their role in catalyzing the new psychological objects and the phenomena they trigger. Besides, a therapeutic use of horizon/signs aimed at fostering a reconstruction of the field could be imagined. Another potentially relevant field of application of the idea of horizon/signs is how they play a role in development and education.

Continuity and Discontinuity of the Educational Context: Early Leavers’ in-Between Life Stories

Through six case studies of young Italian people not in education, employment, or training, I tried to understand the systems of beliefs, representations, values, and justifications as well as the psychosocial dynamics concurring to the sense making of school failure and early leaving in relation to personal experience and micro-social contexts. From the theoretical point of view, I discuss the idea of an autopoietic development of the individual guided by delegated social institutions, such as school, that set the condition for the person’s potentialities to express and contribute to the system organization. At the same time, this guidance is value-driven and defines the range of objectives, boundaries, and deviance that define an acceptable developmental outcome for the community. The educational system can operate on what is considered schooling and defining the boundaries of what is “not schooling,” being unable to guide towards a new definition of the person. Thus, once a student drops out of the educational system without entering another system, such as the job market, a dramatic situation emerges.