Individuals as actors in institutions

Abstract

Individuals as actors in institutions Presenters: Fabienne Gfeller & Martina Cabra (University of Neuchâtel), Tijana Jokić Zorkić (University of Belgrade), Markéta Machková (Academy of Performing Arts, Prague; University of Neuchâtel), Biljana Stanković (University of Belgrade).

Submission description When examining the possible contributions of theoretical psychology to social issues such as community building, the question of institutions and their role in shaping human experience and action emerges. If we understand institutions as relatively persistent social forms and practices (e.g. school or family) whose stabilization is achieved through bodies of rules and material arrangements (Cabra & Zittoun, in press), their importance for individual experience is notably to provide an environment that allows future orientation through its repetitive character (Valsiner, 2008) and interpersonal coordination through shared objects and meanings (e.g. Star & Griesemer, 1989). Institutions might however also represent a limiting element for human development when their structure becomes too rigid (Clot, 2008), when they discriminate or exclude certain groups of people (Aalbers & Teo, 2017; Daniels et al., 2019) and when they convey or are based on meanings hindering peoples’ development (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964). While those studies highlight what institutions do to individuals, how they frame, equip and even transform them, sociocultural psychology invites us to pay attention as well to what people do to and with institutions, how they possibly resist and change them. Indeed, when being confronted to or entering an institution, individuals try to make sense of it and act by drawing on their personal life trajectory (Cabra & Zittoun, in press). In other words, the sociogenetic dynamics of the institution meets the ontogenetic trajectory of individuals in specific situations where change can be examined at a microgenetic scale(see also Strauss & Glaser, 1970). In this virtual salon, we propose to discuss the complex dynamics of co-(de)construction between individuals and institutions. We draw on our diverse research projects, dealing with different social and societal issues, notably: teachers’ meaning making processes around the implementation of a new educational policy, students' and young researchers’ challenges in a context of blurring of academic boundaries, women’s subjectivity and agency in the frame of public healthcare services and older people’s relation to framed flats designed by political institutions. Tijana Jokić Zorkić will present her work on the implementation of a new educational policy by teachers, considered as a creative and interpretive process of meaning negotiation through everyday practices in institutional context. Her research showed how the implementation of inclusive educational policy in Serbia caused a rupture in teachers’ professional trajectories and how institutional artefacts mediated making sense of inclusive education. Inclusive educational policy expects teachers to become agents of equitable education, however artefacts that would support transition towards such agency were not always at disposal for all teachers – system practices have been incoherent in the meaning and positions they prescribe, and schools’ community, division of labour, and rules validated multiple meanings of inclusive education. Additionally, when adequate mediators were available, their becoming resources for transition towards agency for inclusive education depended on teachers’ professional ideologies. Markéta Machková will reflect on her experience as interdisciplinary PhD. student and teacher who has been navigating between two institutions to bring together theater-based practices with research in psychology. By methods of (auto-)ethnography and text analysis, challenges will be pinpointed, that she and her students experienced during a course which introduced them into psycho-physical artistic research: In their feedbacks, students (of social sciences and humanities) reported disorientation, when offered to include their bodies and voices into inquiry and learning processes. They also manifested confusion, when asked to build up their essays on personal themes and motivations. This encounter with a different approach has made students realize that in their institution, 1. education had mostly been understood and practiced as purely intellectual, and 2. rigorous requirements on writing tasks had been clouding over what they actually wished to say. This considering, dialectics of institutional benefits and limitations will be discussed as well as creative ways of mutual transformations between individuals and institutions. Biljana Stanković will draw on her research on women’s embodied subjectivity during pregnancy and birth embedded in alienating constellations of local institutional medical practice. The aim will be to show why institutional socio-material networks are persistent, requiring a lot of resources to challenge, but also how resistance and different outcomes for women’s subjectivity are possible, even in a problematic institutional context. It will be argued that various actors in the situation – healthcare professionals, bodily processes, material aspects of the environment, technological means, as well as experiences, competences and actions of the individual person – need to be related and attuned so to lead to coordinated, shared activity and positive outcomes for the subject. Through this discussion subjectivity and agency will not be conceptualized as inherent properties of the individual, but as distributed, processual and (technologically) mediated, thus challenging the modernist representations of subjectivity. Fabienne Gfeller & Martina Cabra will examine how older people arriving in a newly built house with so called framed flats experience this environment and its rules, and participate in its elaboration. These flats were designed by political and institutional actors as a part of a policy reform addressing the challenge of demographic change. Meeting specific standards aiming at favouring autonomy, security and social life, they are halfway between nursing homes and normal, “usual” homes. However, we show that three facts create opportunities for the older people to participate in the shaping of their living space: firstly, these types of flats have been designed quite recently; secondly, their promoters want to distinguish them clearly from nursing homes; thirdly, the building in which we did ethnographic observations opened its doors recently and all the tenants arrived more or less at the same time. Thus, we examine tenants’ movements of negotiation in the frame of what we could call a rather “light” institution.