Social Representations

Following Moscovici (1972), this paper addresses the questions: What is the aim of research within a social representations perspective? Is it to support or to criticize the social order? Is it to consolidate or transform it? After a brief overview of social representations theory, I argue that while the theory appears to have the conceptual tools to begin this critical task, there are serious criticisms and points of underdevelopment that need addressing. In order for social representations theory to develop into a rigorously critical theory there are three controversial issues that require clarification. These are (a) the relationship between psychological processes and social practices, (b) the reification and legitimization of different knowledge systems, and (c) agency and resistance in the co-construction of self-identity. After discussing each issue in turn, with illustrations from research on racializing representations, I conclude the paper with a discussion of the role of representations in the ideological construction and contestation of reality.

Resumo A abordagem estrutural das representações sociais é amplamente utilizada em pesquisas brasileiras, no entanto, existe o uso quase exclusivo da análise prototípica (ou análise das evocações livres). O modelo dos esquemas cognitivos de base, elaborado por Rouquette e Guimelli estuda, dentro da abordagem estrutural, as relações que ocorrem no pensamento social. Mais precisamente, este modelo estuda as relações entre os diferentes cognemas ativados por um objeto de representação. As relações são formali-zadas por 28 conectores reagrupados em três famílias ou meta-esquemas; avaliação, descrição e prática. O modelo prevê a utilização de três índices, ou valências, para descrever o grau de ativação de cada meta-esquema na população estudada o que nos permite diagnosticar a forma de pensamento acerca do objeto. Mais precisamente as valências indicam as dimensões representacionais ativadas pelo o objeto na população. Estas dimensões podem ser descritivas, ligadas ao julgamento e avaliação ou relacionadas com as práticas do grupo em questão. Palavras-chave: Esquemas cognitivos de base, representações sociais, abordagem estrutural, núcleo central. Abstract The structural approach to social representations is widely employed in Brazilian research. However, the studies use prototypical analysis (or free evocations analysis) almost exclusively. The basic cog-nitive schemes model proposed by Rouquette and Guimelli studies the relationships that take place in social thinking. More precisely, such model studies the relationships between the different cognems

Shared Beliefs in a Society: Social Psychological Analysis is an important contribution to current social psychology, still struggling to refocus its gaze on the societal, cultural and institutional levels of psychology. While there has been much debate on the individualising nature of social psychology, there have been too few serious attempts to provide a rigorously social focus for the disciplineboth in terms of theoretical approaches and the actual content of research projects. Bar-Tal's recent book, which draws together much of his previous work on societal beliefs in Israel, attempts to provide this refocus on a societal psychology and so demonstrates the psychological importance of the connections between "individual beliefs and the beliefs that characterise the social system of which the individuals are members" (p. 152).

This essay explores the nature and significance of aesthetic approaches to the study of word politics.  More specifically, it contrasts aesthetic with mimetic forms of representation.  The latter, which have dominated international relations scholarship, seek to represent the political as authentically as possible.  An aesthetic approach, by contrast, assumes that there is always a gap between a form of representation and what is represented therewith.  Rather than ignoring or seeking to narrow this gap, as mimetic approaches do, aesthetic insight recognises that the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politics.  The essay argues for the need to reclaim the political value of the aesthetic, not to replace one orthodoxy with another, but to broaden our abilities to comprehend and deal with the key dilemmas of world politics.  Images, narratives and sounds could then be appreciated alongside more accepted sources of knowledge about the international.  But embarking on such an aesthetic turn amounts to more than simply adding an additional, sensual layer of interpretation.  It calls for a significant shift away from a model of thought that recognises external appearances and channels them into one form of common sense, towards an approach that generates a more diverse but also more direct encounter with the political.  The latter allows for productive interactions across different faculties, including sensibility, imagination and reason, without

The success of female athletes in the 1996 Olympics brought with it a great deal of optimism that women in sport would finally receive acceptance for their athletic talents.  This optimism was concomitantly fueled by the rise of women’s sport magazines. This study was designed with two purposes.  First, through an analysis of both visual and literal texts, we sought to replicate previous research in determining whether there had been any changes in the coverage of female sport and athletes in Sports Illustrated’s historically male-centered magazine.  Second, the same standards of review were applied to Sports Illustrated for Women to discover if the mandates for marketing femininity are so strong that they have crossed over to this female-specific sport magazine as well. An analysis of content (1,105 articles and 1,745 photographs) within Sports Illustrated and Sports Illustrated for Women from 1997-1999 found that women continue to be underrepresented, portrayed in ‘traditionally-feminine sports’, or shown in non-sport related scenery in both media outlets.  Within the pages of media explicitly focused on women’s issues within sport, successful female athletes continue to be constructed in stereotypical and traditional conceptions of femininity that supercede their athletic ability.  It is suggested that this generally unoffensive, status-quo approach has been continued in order to maintain marketability to advertisers and to general sports readers.

As Tajfel realised over twenty years ago, "we live in a world in which the processes of unification and diversification proceed apace, both of them faster than ever before" (Tajfel, 1978). As a consequence questions of identity, group membership and representation pervade daily interactions in contemporary societies. Urbanisation, migration, globalisation, new medias and modern technologies threaten the stability of both social identities (Rutherford, 1990) and collective representations (Moscovici, 1984). There are constant pressures on many of us to examine and re-examine our different identities against the flux of unstable representations around us. Identity theorists must keep apace of the changing nature of our social environments and ascertain whether or not our theories can account for the changing nature of identity.

This paper presents an investigation of the structure of word associations dependent on the context in which they are assessed. Respondents from Spain and Nicaragua produced free associations about war and peace. Word associations about each of the two stimulus words were produced either spontaneously or within the context of a distracting priming condition in contrast to the association task. The semantic space for each stimulus word (war, peace) is analysed to find substructures of words which remain stable across contexts.

This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the ‘CCO’ strand – short for ‘Communication is Constitutive of Organizing’. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity.

Social representation theory is scrutinized for its capacity to ask new questions and to give new answers to social psychological problems. Its social constructionist implications and relationship to brute facts are investigated. It is shown that social representations result from collective symbolic coping with "brute" facts. Consequently representations create the domesticated world of social objects which implies to consider activity as part of a representation. Culture change in modern societies is shown to produce "cognitive polyphasia" by adding alternative representations to existing ones instead of replacing them.

This study identifies undocumented immigrants' obstacles to realizing their health care rights in France. The ethnographic fieldwork informing this study was carried out in Paris from March 2007 to July 2008. Research findings are based on (1) participant observation carried out in two grassroots health associations catering to undocumented immigrants in Paris (one providing legal and medical aid to undocumented immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, and another focused specifically on assisting undocumented individuals seeking a visa for medical reasons, as well as women victims of domestic violence); (2) a review of legislative debates on the issue of healthcare access for undocumented immigrants in France, and (3) recently published reports on healthcare access for the undocumented in Europe. The paper analyzes how interaction among intangible factors d namely social stigmatization, precarious living conditions, and the climate of fear and suspicion generated by increasingly restrictive immigration policies d hinders undocumented immigrants' access to health care rights and, furthermore, minimizes immigrants' sense of entitlement to such rights in this European context. Intangible factors such as fear and suspicion have powerful "subjectivation" effects, which influence how both undocumented immigrants and their interlocutors (i.e., healthcare providers) think about "deservingness." Medical anthropology is in a unique position to demonstrate and theorize these factors and effects, which inform contemporary debates about migration and "health ethics."

Although place-related identity is receiving increasing attention within the environmental psychology field, little attention has been paid to deepen on place identity at the local level and better understand the social nature of urban identity. Focusing on the case of Zaragoza (the fifth largest city in Spain), this work aims to contribute to previous literature by understanding how shared city meanings and socio-demographic characteristics influence urban identity formation, proposing a standard measure of urban identity as a social identity formed by three-dimensions (cognitive, affective and evaluative), and testing the influence of urban identity on citizens' behaviors. Results show that: (1) city social representations participate in the formation process of the three dimensions of urban identity, (2) the oper-ationalization of urban identity as a second-order construct is validated, and (3) urban identity influences citizens behavioral support to local initiatives via personal and social norms.

Using material from three qualitative studies into the social and psychological consequences of racism, this paper explores the insights gained from conceptualizing race as stigma. Not only does this shed light on the construction and contestation of racism in the lives of the research participants, the material presented raises important issues for a social psychology of stigma more generally. These include an assessment of the embodiment of stigma, the ideological construction of stigma within particular histories, the impact of stigma on identity and the ways in which we collectively contest and resist stigma. While acknowledging how stigma, particularly the stigma of race, acts to deny humanity, agency and liberty, I illustrate how stigma is collectively constructed, institutionalized and resisted in social and political relations. I conclude that a crucial part of the psychology of stigma must be a focus on the possibilities for communities to contest and transform representations and practices that stigmatize; that is, we need to explore the possibilities and conditions for stigmatized communities as agents and not (only) as objects or victims of stigma. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

""Shale gas is a novel source of fossil fuel which is extracted by induced hydraulic fracking, or “fracking.” This article examines the the socio-political dimension of fracking as manifested in the UK press at three key temporal points in the debate on the practice. Three newspaper corpora were analysed qualitatively using Thematic Analysis and Social Representations Theory. Three overarching themes are discussed: “April-May 2011: From Optimism to Scepticism”; “November 2011: (De-)Constructing and Re-Constructing Risk and Danger; “April 2012: Consolidating Social Representations of Fracking.” In this article, we examine the emergence and inter-relations between competing social representations, discuss the dynamics of threat positioning and show how threat can be re-construed in order to serve particular socio-political ends in the debate on fracking.

Keywords
fracking; media; climate change; environmental communication; social representations theory
""

The aim of the present study was to explore how teenagers explain why bullying takes place at school, and whether there were any differences in explaining bullying due to gender and prior bullying experiences. One hundred and seventy-six Swedish students in Grade 9 responded to a questionnaire. Mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative methods) were used to analyze data. The grounded theory analysis generated five main categories and 26 sub categories regarding accounts of bullying causes. Results indicated that youth tended to explain bullying in terms of individualistic reasons (bully attributing and victim attributing) than in terms of peer group, school setting, or human nature/society reasons. Girls were more likely to attribute bullying causes to the bully and much less to the victim, compared to boys. Moreover, youth classified as bullies were more likely to attribute the reason for bullying to the victim and much less to the bully, compared to victims, bystanders, and victims/bullies.

Caroline Howarth is currently a lecturer in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, teaching on social representations, social identities, community, social constructions of self, ethnicity and racism. Her research focuses on the dialectic between representation and identity. In particular, she explores how representations of different communities and social groups impinge on how these communities and groups define and so re-present themselves. She has explored these issues in relation to community health and social participation, resistance and the cultural exclusion of black British children at school, the racialised and gendered dynamics to the (re)production of local youth identities, the impact of others' stigmatising representations on identity, the social psychology of community and the consequences of difference in the research relationship. She is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology and on the editorial board of Papers on Social Representations.

This theoretical paper presents a cultural-level analysis of stereotype content concerning derogated outgroups in the West. It proposes that the ethos of self-control is a key source of widespread thinking about outgroups, and thus a key factor in the social construction of certain groups as superior and others as inferior. Drawing on the social representations approach, the paper complements and extends existing analyses of stereotype content that stem from social identity theory and the structural hypothesis. By emphasising cultural values, particularly that of self-control of the body, it casts light on neglected sources of stereotype content such as its emotional, visceral and symbolic roots. Furthermore, by exploring further dimensions of the selfcontrol ethos -linked to the mind and to destiny -the paper shows that derogated outgroups are often symbolised in terms of contravention of multiple aspects of self-control. Finally, the paper contributes to a cultural understanding of social exclusion by investigating the origin, production and diffusion of the symbolisation of out-groups in terms of deficits in self-control.

While scholars working in the sociology of gender, body, health, sport and media have begun to address the paucity of research into media representations of men and masculinities, the literature to date has failed consistently to address the racialised aspects of media dwelling male athletic bodies. The same critique can be applied to recent explorations of popular men’s magazine, Men’s Health. Current research has thus systematically underplayed the significance of “race” as a defining feature of idealised, mediated masculinities. During this paper then, I use Critical Race Theory to guide a semiotic analysis of a year’s worth of Men’s Health magazine. Firstly, I argue that white male athletic bodiesare represented as idealised masculine types, possessing both the virtues of body and mind, while their black male counterparts, to varying degrees, are depicted as spectacular, violent and hyper-masculine. Secondly, I go on to argue further that this idealisation of the white male athletic body is a reaction to broader social and cultural transformations, indicative of late-modern societies. That is, I suggest Men’s Health’s mantra of self-regulation is better understood as a call to white men to exercise greater embodied control in order to reaffirm jurisdiction and supremacy, during an epoch of uncertainty. Thirdly, following this line of argument, the paper contends that future readings of Men’s Health, and men’s magazines more broadly, must seek to understand better how racialised discourses inform dominant media representations of masculinities.

O livro Imagens da colonização trata das representações do índio, escritas e gráficas, entre os séculos XVI e XVII. Aí, procurei analisar não somente as imagens dos tupis e “tapuios”, mas também de diferentes etnias radicadas na América espanhola. Fossem gravuras francesas, holandesas, italianas alemães ou inglesas, os cânones artísticos e teológicos pouco diferiam no momento de descrever os povos do Novo Mundo. Sem sombra de dúvidas, as “representações coletivas” europeias da reforma e contra-reforma determinaram as narrativas e as figurações. Nas imagens sobre os americanos encontram-se a tradição escolástica, as disputas religiosas entre católicos e protestantes, a caça às bruxas e os dilemas provocados pela conquista.
As crônicas e as descrições de viagens fizeram tábula rasa da tradição ameríndia, anularam as suas especificidades. Todos eram índios e isso bastava para os religiosos, artistas e viajantes europeus. Aliás, a tradição europeia buscou no passado remoto argumentos para consolidar a dominação e a desigualdade entre os cristãos e ameríndios. Sua superioridade respaldava a conquista, a colonização e a catequese. Em contrapartida, os nativos eram seres degenerados: desconheciam a palavra revelada do senhor, o valor do ouro, da prata e do trabalho. Viviam na indolência e precisavam dos controles impostos pelos homens brancos. Empregado como ideologia da conquista, o barbarismo aristotélicos legitimava a guerra justa, a escravidão, porque os nativos eram incapazes de entender os ensinamentos divinos e de receber a conversão. Portanto, eram criaturas de Deus, forjados para servir aos cristãos, usando a sua força bruta em favor dos empreendimentos coloniais. 
Para além de identificar um substrato cultural comum, o livro traça um contraponto entre as imagens produzidas pelos jesuítas e pelos demais colonizadores. Os inacianos estavam imbuídos de livrar os índios da escravidão, pois o cativeiro os afastava da conversão e da vida cristã. A defesa da Companhia de Jesus impunha abandono da antigas tradições locais, da nudez, poligamia e canibalismo.
De todo modo, o esforço dos padres não inviabilizou o emprego dos nativos como força motriz dos primeiros estabelecimentos coloniais, nas lavouras, na expansão das áreas coloniais, nas guerras contra as tribos que enfrentavam os portugueses. Embora fossem livres, nas propriedades jesuíticas, os braços não raro eram indígenas. Por vezes, os religiosos pouco diferiam dos seculares quando representavam os nativos como bárbaros, embora os jesuítas considerassem que a conversão era mecanismo seguro para os livrar do barbarismo. 
Em suma, afirmo que os colonizadores buscavam respaldo para impedir a inserção dos índios na cristandade, pois eram seres brutos e incapazes de se tornar católicos. Para tanto reforçavam a necessidade escravizá-los, enquanto os sacerdotes procuravam representá-los como gentios, cristãos em potencial, pois, do contrário, a catequese estava ameaçada.
    Escravistas ou não, os projetos coloniais pretendiam inserir os povos indígenas no mundo mercantilista. Os braços nativos contribuíram com a expansão das áreas coloniais e comércio entre o Brasil e a metrópole. Os índios viabilizavam então a força motriz capaz de implementar fortificações, vilas, igrejas, engenhos e plantações. A conquista não se reduziu ao âmbito econômico, pois os moradores e os viajantes conduziram os habitantes do Novo Mundo para dentro da cultura da Europa ocidental. Os ameríndios perderem paulatinamente a autonomia própria das comunidades distantes do velho continente e ganharam feições e atributos há muito presentes no imaginário cristão. Os índios foram denominados de gentio, bárbaros, selvagens e antropófagos. A partir dessas nomeações, os colonizadores pretendiam ressaltar o primitivismo dos nativos e sua incapacidade de gerir a própria vida. O abandono dos “costumes abomináveis” justificava a intervenção na América, consolidava a conquista e a colonização europeias.
A maior contribuição do livro estava, porém, no capítulo terceiro: “Mulheres canibais”. Aí realizei comparação entre texto e imagem que me permitiu delimitar um tema de pesquisa original. Oriundas dos relatos de viagens, as descrições sobre os costumes indígenas apontavam para a intensa participação dos homens nas guerras e nas cerimônias de canibalismo. Diferentemente do texto, nas imagens, as mulheres se tornaram protagonistas. A literatura quinhentista e mesmo os estudos da antropologia estruturalista defendiam a participação feminina nos rituais com funções específicas.
No entanto, nas representações visuais, a ênfase nas mulheres canibais e a escassa participação dos guerreiros estava vinculada à misoginia, não raro presente nos escritos e gravuras quinhentistas protestantes. Aliás, percebi que a misoginia aumentou a participação feminina nos rituais macabros representados nas gravuras. A ênfase deve ser interpretada como parte da tradição luterana e da influência do Malleus maleficarum sobre o pensamento europeu do norte da Europa, origem de boa parte das gravuras dedicadas às mulheres canibais. Em diversas imagens constatei semelhanças entre as mulheres canibais e as feiticeiras europeias. Elas possuíam comportamentos e formas físicas semelhantes às enviadas do demônio.
Como mencionei, os predomínio das mulheres nos rituais de canibalismo não possui, porém, sustentação empírica, exceto nas gravuras de Theodor de Bry. Os relatos quinhentistas e seiscentistas restringiam bastante sua participação nos banquetes canibalescos. Os estudiosos dos tupis defendem a participação de jovens e mulheres na ingestão de carne humana, sobretudo as entranhas cozidas em forma de mingau. Em contrapartida, os guerreiros costumavam ingerir os músculos assados no moquém. Em suma, a participação feminina era restrita enquanto os homens protagonizavam os relatos dedicados ao canibalismo tupi.
Vale ainda mencionar a participação das velhas índias nos rituais representados em gravuras. Aí, elas comem carne humana e sugam a gordura. Segundo os relatos, Deus as castigou, pois perderam a juventude por causa de seus desregramentos, pelo gosto bizarro de ingerir e se deliciar com a carne humana. Suas peles enrugadas e cabelos muito ralos as tornam encarnação do vício, aliadas e privilegiadas de Satã. Com características demoníacas, as velhas retratadas do Theodor de Bry também estão em um desenho que ilustra o livro de John Nieuhof. A cena se passa em uma floresta, onde um nativo atira uma fecha contra uma ave. No pano de fundo, porém, duas mulheres comem braços humanos e estão próximas a vários vestígios do canibalismo: crânio descarnado, ossos humanos, restos de animais e outros objetos de difícil identificação. Por certo a gravura em questão se inspirou na obra de Hans Baldung Grien, o famoso pintor quinhentista das bruxas.

White British Muslims pose a challenge to racialized representations of British Muslims as non-white, foreign and Other. By drawing on tools from Critical Discourse Analysis to develop Social Representations Theory on a micro-analytic level, and making connections with other relevant social psychological theories on intergroup relations, this paper examines the constructions of white British Muslims as a threat in six national and two Muslim British newspapers. It looks at how discourses are used to create, perpetuate and challenge the 'hegemonisation' of social representations in majority and minority press. The findings show that white British Muslims are portrayed as a threat not just despite of, but because of their position as part of the 'white British' ingroup. Consequently, the threat they pose often leads to their Muslimness being emphasised. This was, at times, contested however, either through direct challenges, or by making the threat ambivalent by drawing on their whiteness.

The purpose of this article is to question the foundations and structure of entrepreneurs' social representation in the French press. Social representations are the result of a perceptive and cognitive construction of reality, which transforms social objects (people, contexts, situations) into symbolic categories (values, beliefs, ideologies), therefore providing a collective signifi cant system for the regulation of cognitions and actions . Within the consensual reality through which the social world is created and experienced, the press can be emphasized as an entrepreneurial 'Greek chorus' (Kets de Vries, 2000) playing a key role in the diffusion and transformation of entrepreneurial culture at the local and national levels. We conducted a discourse analysis of 962 articles, from 2001 to 2005, in order to study the press's potential impact on entrepreneurial desirability and feasibility beliefs. We identifi ed three main categories of discourses -the legitimacy discourse, the normativity discourse, and the accessibility discourse, which may impact readers' desirability and feasibility beliefs. This is the fi rst attempt to assess the role of the public discourse in fuelling entrepreneurial intentions in the French context.

Universities utilize language as a powerful tool to influence people’s perceptions. By employing language as a means of information and representation, electronic websites are becoming increasingly important for both universities and students. There are unanswered questions related to the portrayal of Saudi universities through the use of linguistic representation on their websites and the contribution of these websites to understanding the overlapping factors that reinforce academic practices within the Saudi social structure. This study compares and analyses the various discourses that are used to represent Saudi universities on their websites in terms of social constructs (e.g., gender and race). To that end, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is utilized to describe, analyse, and interpret the textual and visual representations of five Saudi university websites at the local, institutional and societal levels. The results indicate that the universities use a common systematic promotional discourse to represent themselves, emphasizing prestige and uniqueness. This finding means that universities are in control of the informational message with which their viewers interact. Moreover, terms such as “leaders”, “Vision 2030”, “distinguished education” and “competent” frequently appear without further explanations, thus triggering uncertainty. The findings also suggest that the websites lack diversity in their representation of gender, race and economic status. The descriptive analysis reveals limited textual content providing viewers with cursory information about important topics such as registration, academic majors, campus and financial aid. Furthermore, the acknowledgement of underrepresented individuals is highly asserted by embracing and promoting diversity. This study recommends that these institutions should focus on the quality level of information and areas of strength rather than quantity. Furthermore, they need to employ their mission statements to generate realistic directions and purposes that are tailored to society’s needs.

This article examines practices surrounding short‐term study abroad, focusing on how its outsourcing to professional agencies can shape student encounters abroad. Through ethnographic work in Southeast Asia, I explore the “exposure model” of intercultural learning relied on by many programs. I argue that for‐profit providers, catering to administrative and neoliberal exigencies in higher education, have fostered an uncritical “discourse of going,” which subordinates consideration of pedagogical goals and outcomes to the imperative of increasing participation.

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Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, Asians, particularly those in Chinese communities, have faced increased discrimination and overt racism in addition to the virus itself. In this study, the authors examined social representations of COVID-19 in mainstream newspapers. We evaluated 451 articles from three major publications representing three countries: China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. A qualitative thematic analysis, conducted through the lens of social representations theory (SRT) and its concept of cognitive polyphasia, revealed four major themes: (a) the virus' portrayal as a threat; (b) the racialization of COVID-19 as a multi-faceted threat; (c) calls for collectivization to curb the racialization of the virus; and (d) speculative solutions to end discrimination against Asians. Our results suggest that print media emphasize the idea that global efforts must be made to change how people think about, talk about, and understand the COVID-19 pandemic.

Re ecting wider debates in the discipline, recent scholarship in children's geographies has focused attention on the meanings of the political. While supportive of work that opens up new avenues for conceptualizing politics beyond the liberal rational subject, we provide a critique of research methods which delink politics from historical context and relations of power. Focusing on the use of nonrepresentational theory as a research methodology, the paper points to the limits of this approach for children's political formation as well as for sustained scholarly collaboration. We argue instead for a politics of articulation, in the double sense of communication and connection. An empirical case study is used as an illustrative example.

Thirty-nine educated middle-class residents of Patna, India, were interviewed about a vignette describing the behaviour of a seemingly mad man or woman. The interview explored their representations of traditional healing methods and of Modern psychiatric notions. Besides explanations for mental illness and madness, the interviews also covered the reaction of families and neighbours to such phenomena. Respondents think of different causes depending on the context, ranging from frustrated desires, shock, and heredity to spirit possession. The majority's spontaneous preference for modern, psychiatric, treatment often co-exists with a faith in traditional healing. This faith is strengthened by their family's traditional preference. The results are discussed as an example of a process of modernisation of common-sense in which popularised scientific notions become anchored in the traditional setting of social structure and family life. The newly acquired knowledge forms a loosely organised social representation confronting a strongly objectified cultural representation of traditional thinking.

Political communication research in the United States, despite two decades of change in how the public receives information, follows theories that rely on definitions of citizenship from a century ago and on metaphors growing out of communication techniques and practices of five decades ago. A review of the state of news media, facing technical, labor, and economic crises, and the state of political science, illustrated through research methods, leads to a reexamination of communication at the intersection of media and politics. Political communication theory has come to rely on functional metaphors, economic background assumptions, an emphasis on method, and a legacy of structuralism. The crisis presents current theories with challenges for the representation of citizens and the press in democracy. Especially as young adults reject older forms of information, political communication can renew itself by deepening existing theory and shifting from old effects rationality to a new "media affect" sensibility. Political communication research is at a turning point, its direction unclear in the face of unprecedented change. The conditions of public information are transforming technologies of political knowledge and common perspectives on political life. But political communication research has had difficulty keeping up. Conference planners still receive a bulk of papers going over familiar ground, especially functionalist research on agenda setting, gatekeeping, and the like. 1 As the field expands in each Research Article 574 International Journal of Press/Politics 16 national setting, scholars repeat existing studies, so that in Spain, for instance, researchers have been retracing ground covered decades ago in other countries under different circumstances. Assailed by turbulence in politics and tumult in the media, political communication has remained cautious in method and theory, its firm traditions and horizons generating few new ideas and rendering inert the drama going on in the world today. Political communication in the current century has lost its moorings.

In this article an examination of how we, in the everyday, develop critical engagement with the shifting relations of power and oppression around us is presented. The article explores the role of representations in maintaining the racialized patterns of school exclusion in Britain. Social representations theory is used to investigate how racializing re-presentations pervade and create institutionalized practices, how these re-presentations invade young people's sense of self and ultimately how young people collaborate to resist and reject oppressive relations. The material presented here, from interviews with young people excluded from school, and parents, teachers and others involved in school exclusion, illustrates how young people problematize and critique racializing re-presentations while participating in the conditions of oppression and resistance that pervade their experiences of school. The discussion is divided into three sections. The first examines the institutionalization of stigmatizing representations, visible in social practices. The second section looks at the role of re-presentation in the social construction of ‘Black pupils’. The concluding section explores the possibilities of resistance and critical engagement in the everyday. As a whole this reveals how young people develop critical engagement with the re-presentations that filter into and so constitute their realities. This enables an analysis of the role of resistance and contestation in social re-presentation, highlights the importance of participation and community and so invites a critical version of social representations theory. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Reflexive approaches not only maintain that representations of danger are socially constructed, but also that they relate with political behaviour. Representations of terrorism, for instance, are argued to constitute that danger in distinct ways and thus to make certain counterterror policies possible. This article challenges this popular association of reflexive security studies with constitutive effects. It argues that constitutive argumentation advances an insufficiently tangible argument of effect, and that this conceptual weakness derives from both a problematic foundational social theory and a premature rejection of causation. Drawing on the social theory of Margaret Archer and Roy Bhaskar and a differentiated notion of causation, the article advances a ‘dialectical causal’ framework for the analysis of representations of danger instead. Applying it to contemporary Swiss terrorism politics, the article shows how this framework improves on constitutive argumentation in disentangling the political powers involved in the production and enactment of representations of danger.

The present research aims to investigate the psychosocial phenomena of obedience and disobedience in young adults residing in the United States, as a replication of a previous study by Pozzi, Fattori, Bocchiaro, and Alfieri (2014). We utilize social representation theory as a means to better understand and define (dis)obedience, a behavioral dimension of the concept of authority.
The analysis was conducted using a concurrent mixed methods design. One hundred and fifty-one participants completed a self-report online questionnaire.
The results indicate that participants see both obedience and disobedience as related to an authority. Obedience was mostly perceived as an ability to be responsive to laws, social norms, or physical authorities, as well as a positive social object. Disobedience, instead, was defined as a failure of a negative line of conduct. These results differ from previous research, contributing meaningfully and pragmatically to the theoretical debate on (dis)obedience. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

This study analyzed 394 U.S. Spanish- and English-language television advertisements from 2013 for differences in gender representation. The findings indicate a high prevalence of gender stereotypes in both samples. For example, more females than males were depicted as young and were usually shown at home. Males were generally fully dressed, whereas females were often suggestively dressed. Voiceovers were clearly dominated by males, and product categories were stereotypically associated with gender. Despite allegedly more traditional Latina/o gender role attitudes in society, this study found little variation between Spanish- and English language television advertisements in terms of gender stereotypes. The potential effects of such representations on audiences are discussed based on social cognitive theory and cultivation theory.

The importance of race as social category in the United States is evident in how the federal government over time has defined the racial categories on the census forms starting with the first census in 1790. Minority groups have always contested these official categorizations (Miller, 2007; Simon & Piche, 2012) because these categorizations are at variance with how these groups define themselves. These categorizations are even more problematic because there is usually no single racial definition within the various racial groups in the United States. Moreover, these racial definitions are influenced by the history of white racial privilege and discrimination against non-whites. Race has been a major feature of American society (Philogene, 2004a; Zinn, 2005). Therefore, studying the evolving categorizations of race on the census forms in the United States is a study of the history of the cultural representations of race which is the objective of this chapter.
The evolution and expansion of racial categories suggest that race as a social category is not fixed. The Jews and the Irish from Europe for example, were not considered white when the first major waves of Jewish and Irish immigrants came to the United States despite their White physicality. They were subsequently accepted as whites in the society (Brodkin, 1998; Ignatiev, 2008). The censuses of the United States since 1790 provide historical and contemporary evidence that race is a floating signifier (Hall, 1997b). This chapter explicates the content of these dynamic racial representations. The chapter starts with a discussion of how race has been represented in the United States followed by a discussion of social representation theory (SRT) which frames the study. Next, the method is outlined and the findings presented and discussed using SRT.

This chapter deals with a widely studied case, that is, Prato, a middle-sized city with rooted industrial traditions, in the Centre of Italy. Prato is a textile industrial district embedded in the so-called Third Italy—an area characterized by the presence of small firms spread throughout the territory, linked together in supply and subcontracting relationships—which, in the last twenty years, has undergone a profound transformation as a consequence of the crisis of textile and immigration, leading to the formation of a large Chinese community. The related changes brought with them problems of social cohesion and sustainable development. The authors address these issues by analyzing both academic and public discourses on Prato. Their basic idea is that common stereotypes act as drivers of a public discourse that prevents the city to re-negotiate its identity. The analysis concludes that different forms of hybridization—particularly cultural hybridization—are occurring, which would need further investigations.

Departing from the stated intent of the social representation approach to give a social constructionist account of social processes, this paper presents a critical analysis of language use within the realm of social representations research. Three questions are posed: (a) Does a social representation represent an object? (b) Can social representations be true or false? and (c) Is social construction action? All three are answered negatively. It is shown that object-talk is inherent to social cognition and to the common-sensical view of social actors, but incompatible with a constructionist position; that truth-talk is part of collective discourse in the socio-genesis of representations, but senseless when talking about a representation; that a social representation is not a representation of an object, but ontologically identical with it; and that social construction happens rather than being intended by social actors. Consequently, social representations are interpreted as the significant meaning of constructive events and neither as entities in the minds of people nor floating above a collectivity. Their relationship with discourse analysis is discussed.