a reflexive account of a life-journey in cultural psychology

What is it about?

Over the course of 50 years, I have published several books and articles about human development, grounded in the academic disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology. This book adopts a more personal approach reflecting on the challenges I faced over the course of my own development, as a migrant, as a parent, and as a policy-oriented administrator. Emerging from an English childhood home, French schooling in London and adolescence at a British boarding school, I embarked on early adulthood in Singapore, Oxford University, with early marriage and parenthood in Lusaka, where I began research on child development at the newly established University of Zambia. The society that hosted me as an immigrant was multilingual and caught up in the political transformation of decolonisation. Viewing local children through the lens of contemporary, Western psychology proved unsatisfactory. I became a naturalised citizen of the new nation, and married into an indigenous family. Communicating with children and their parents about the world around us and our relations with one another became an enduring preoccupation for me in the context of two studies that followed a cohort of boys and girls over multiple years of their lives. The first was set in a rural Zambian community, the second in a multiracial American city. After a 12-year sojourn in the USA, I returned to Zambia to assume responsibility as the head of the national university. This book describes the gradual emergence of my philosophical orientation (including the values of interpersonal respect, social inclusion and bridging across cultures) and considers how it reflected both personal experiences and intellectual bids to explain human development, spread across different phases of my life and across different sociocultural contexts, drawing on the idea that every social group forms its own "intimate culture".

Featured Image

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Why is it important?

. builds a bridge between humanities and social sciences . reflects on challenges of practical engagement of theory with public policy . resource for multi-cultural studies of human development

Perspectives