Contextualizing Psychology : Critical Perspectives and Person-Oriented Approaches

Designed for advanced students and scholars of critical psychology, this book offers strategies for reflecting on contemporary psychological theory and practice. It introduces tools for identifying approaches that treat humans as socially and culturally situated persons, and presents research methods that take context and personhood into account.

Much contemporary psychology is characterized by a natural science epistemology that overlooks the richness of human experience. This book offers a timely and necessary critique and emphasizes a conception of human beings as persons embedded in relationships, cultural groups, and historical contexts. Eva Magnusson and Jeanne Marecek provide strategies for critical reflective scrutiny of contemporary psychological theories and practices. Using 'styles of thinking' as one of their conceptual tools, they investigate whether, and how, theories, research methods, and debates across subfields such as cognition, language, and psychopathology take people's situatedness into account. The book gives readers practical guidance for conceptual analysis, and a set of questions for scrutinizing other subfields and practices. It also describes research methods and projects based on a view of humans as situated persons. The book offers both a philosophical foundation and a hands-on guide to a psychology with persons at its center.