Resignifying the World Across and Beyond Categories

This book builds on the activities realized during the VI International Seminar of Cultural Psychology realized in May 2023 in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), particularly a workshop forming a dialogical and open space of theoretical and methodological innovations. More specifically, researchers addressed meaning making processes that enable re-signifying reality across categories—dynamically shifting from one domain to another—and beyond them—developing synthesis and forming new ways of understanding and approaching cultural phenomenon. In this perspective the cultural processes that are discussed concern practical encounters –with people from different ages in different settings, particularly (but not exclusively) in the context of intervention— and pragmatic issues (how to approach people). In a neoliberal society in which language is used in its literal sense over its virtual meaning, categories tend to be reinforced in every iteration and potentially lead to segregation and exclusion as they are rendered invisible through interdiction of speaking (taboo) or framing social encounters with monological logic. In this book, the authors shed new light on categorization by re-signifying it in a dynamic fashion in relation to a variety of domains (gender, mental health, movement, aesthetics, poverty, are some examples). This book furnishes theoretical, methodological and practical tools that enable re-thinking about the process of recategorization. It has the potential to inspire the reframing of theory, research, as well as practices in psychology and other disciplines.