Reflective Sociocultural Psychology: Lost and Found in Collaboration with Funding Agencies and ICT Experts

This paper deals with emerging kinds of collaboration between researchers, funding agencies and ICT (Information and Communications Technology) experts. The goal of this paper is to analyze the challenges and opportunities for researchers presented by such collaborations. The analysis is based on a sociocultural approach, and leads to the following conclusions: (a) the main challenges to collaboration arise from the fact that partners’ communities have different goals and use different sets of mediation tools, (b) there are different ways for researchers to cope with more powerful partners such as major funding agencies (refusing collaboration, pseudo collaboration, asymmetric collaboration, and real partnership), (c) appropriation of mediation tools developed by partners could be useful for researchers, (d) collaboration with partners could be a source of new theoretically interesting phenomenon, and (e) communication with partners who are not familiar with our routine discourses might help us to improve our own understanding.

Aleksandar BaucalEmail:

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Aleksandar Baucal   is an Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology at the University of Belgrade. His main theoretical and empirical interest is co-construction between human development and development of socio-cultural context. At the theoretical level he is searching for integration of different theoretical traditions within a Vygotskian socio-cultural approach. His current researches deal with construction of new competences during interaction with others based on innovative methodology integrating both quantitative and qualitative techniques.