A sociocultural approach to mobile families: A case study.

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NCCR on the moveThis special issue explores the interplay between imagination and human mobility. It presents theoretical, empirical and methodological explorations on how imagination and mobility shape each other. It asks questions such as: how is imagination triggered or blocked by people's experience of mobility? How does the creative process of imagining alternative worlds and lives in turn affect people's capacity and (im)possibilities to move? This editorial, in particular, highlights the contributions of the various articles and addresses a series of emerging ways of studying the interplay between mobility and imagination. It presents the specific ways through which the various articles of this issue offer important explorations on the imagined and potential character of mobility, and on the always changing and shifting nature of imagination on the move.Mobility is a crucial aspect of human life. As more than mere physical movement, mobility relates to the act of moving (Cresswell, 2006;Kaufmann, 2002) entangled with power, norms and meaning (Frello, 2008), and involving social, material, temporal and symbolic components that make movement (im)possible. The capacity and potential to move can be located 'in the dreaming of, planning for, or fear of mobility' (Leivestad, 2016, p. 143), in our fantasying on where, when and how we move. The field of possibilities to move physically can be infused with the act of imagining origins, traversals and destinations, with the aspiration for other lives and future selves. Or a person's imagination can be triggered, blocked or changed across time by the actual experience of (im)mobility. For one can move all around the word, and still have a limited imaginative experience; or conversely, one may be placebound, be stuck in an endless present and have the feeling that life

Section: From Imaginaries On Mobility To Imagining On the Movementioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the interplay between (im)mobility and imagination

Cangià

Zittoun

2020

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“…On the other hand, moving beyond classical approaches to migration in psychology (e.g. Berry, 2001), sociocultural psychology has also more recently tried to define new approaches to mobility, both taking into account current social science research, and the person's experience (Fleer & Hammer, 2013;Greco Morasso & Zittoun, 2014;Kadianaki, 2009;M€ artsin, 2010;M€ artsin & Mahmoud, 2012;Zittoun, Levitan, & Cangia´, 2018). These studies have thus proposed to take seriously people's need to make sense of their experience, and shown that 'experiencing' and making sense of a place do not simply follow being located, geographically and physically, in that place.…”

Section: Theoretical Positioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagination in people and societies on the move: A sociocultural psychology perspective

Zittoun

2020

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This paper proposes a sociocultural psychology approach to mobility. It distinguishes geographical mobility, drawing on mobility studies, from symbolic mobility, that can be achieved through imagination. After the presentation of a theoretical framework, it examines the possible interplay between geographical and symbolic mobility through three case studies: that of people moving to a retirement home, that of a young woman’s trajectory through the Second World War in the UK, and that of families in repeated geographical mobility. The paper thus shows that imagination may expand or guide geographic mobility, but also, in some case, create some stability when geographic mobility becomes excessive. More importantly, it shows that over time, people engage in trajectories of imagination: their various geographical and symbolic mobilities can eventually transform their very mode of imagining.

“…It is rare to find scholarship that attempts to document extended dialogues between different research studies. Rather, dialogues tend to take what has gone before as a point of contention, such that scholars generally include previous research to discuss it critically (Alessandroni, Moreno-N uñez, Rodr ıguez, & Del Olmo, 2019), to specify new research questions (Zittoun, Levitan, & Cangia´, 2018) or to extend a theoretical argument to new empirical territory (Tau, 2018). If we were to unfold this process in time, as we have tried to do here, we may find that such strategies for knowledge 'use' -resituation in Morgan's terms (2014) -take the form of several, non-linear, stages and involve the use of exemplars (whether dialogical or otherwise).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialogical exemplars as communicative tools: Resituating knowledge from dialogical single case studies

Zadeh¹,

Cabra

2019

In this article, we develop the concept of ‘dialogical exemplars’ as communicative tools for scholars who wish to ‘resituate knowledge’ from dialogical single case studies. Exemplars are typological representatives that try to convey typicality in non-taxonomic terms, yet in the existing literature, they are defined in terms of their relationship to a population, class or sample. We suggest instead that ‘dialogical exemplars’, as specific instances that have the self-other at their core, can be used to convey the ‘wholeness’ of cases to various audiences. To support this proposition, we draw upon two single case studies, built 30 years apart, that are concerned with children’s daily lives and experiences. Specifically, we develop a dialogue with and between examples from each case of children's play, not only to make the case for ‘dialogical exemplars’, but also to evidence the process through which we arrived at this concept. We highlight that this process is one that researchers often go through, but, rather curiously, rarely document. In conclusion, we suggest that ‘resituating knowledge’ might be best thought of as several, non-linear, stages in the process of dialogical research that involve, and invite further dialogue.