International Collaboration as Construction of Knowledge and its Constraints

In this paper I draw on Piaget and Habermas to underline the importance of the theoretical distinction between social relations of constraint and social relations of cooperation for reflecting upon inter-institutional projects. I argue that the socio-cultural approach to collaboration has some important limitations that restrict ideological critic and emancipatory research. The limitations of this approach can be located in its epistemological assumptions, a homogenized notion of culture and a weakness in articulating the intrapersonal, inter-personal, inter-group/positional and social representational/ideological levels of analysis. As an empirical example of this I discuss the Sloan centres for family research.

Charis PsaltisEmail:

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Charis Psaltis    is lecturing on Social and Developmental Psychology in the University of Cyprus. He received his MPhil and PhD in Social and Developmental Psychology from the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Cambridge. He also holds a degree in Educational Sciences. His main research interests are social interaction and learning and development, genetic epistemology, social representations of gender, intergroup contact and intergroup relations, the development of national identities, history teaching and collective memory.