Imagining the Past, Constructing the Future
Beschreibung:
Maria C.D.P. Lyra is a Professor of Psychology at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. She is interested in the process of human cultural development, the dynamic features through which human beings faces change and stability throughout their lives. She received her M. A. at Cornell University, U.S.A. and her Ph.D. at São Paulo University, Brazil. She coordinates a research laboratory - LabCCom - dedicated to the study of the process of emergence and development of the subject (self) in and through communication, concentrating on its microgenetic transformations embedded in sociocultural milieu. Culture and sign dynamics are particular relevant to explore diverse themes through reconstructive memory and imagination highlighting the process of internalization/externalization. She co- edited, Determinism and Indeterminism in Developmental and Social Science (Lawrence Welbaum, 1997), Dynamic Process Methodology in the Social and Developmental Sciences (Springer, 2009), Challenges and Strategies for Studying Human Development in Cultural Contexts (Firera & Liuzzo Publishing, 2009)
This book takes a sociocultural, developmental and dialogical perspective to explore the constructive and interconnected nature of remembering and imagining. Conceived as cognitive-affective processes, both emerge at the border of the person and his or her socio-cultural world. Memory is approached as a functional adaption to the environment using the resources of the past in preparation for action in the present. Imagination is tightly related to memory in that both aim to escape the confines of the concrete here-and-now situation; however, while memory is primarily oriented to the past, imagination looks to the future. Both are embedded in the exchanges with the social and cultural milieu, and thus theorizing them has relied on key ideas from Lev Vygotsky, Frederic Bartlett and Mikhail Bakhtin.
Thus, this book aims to integrate theories of remembering and imagining, through rich empirical studies
- in diverse cultural settings and
- concerning the development of self and identity. These two groups of studies compose the subparts that organize the book.