Sarah H. AwadAalborg University · Department of Communication and Psychology
Sarah H. Awad
Psychology
About
31
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230
Citations
Citations since 2017
Education
June 2015 - June 2018
August 2013 - June 2014
June 2004 - June 2005
Publications
Publications (31)
This paper explores how images are used in online far‐right political communication to create distinct groups of “otherness.” Focusing on the Danish People's Party, we look at how symbolic boundaries are constructed through images to emphasize an exclusive conception of the nation and its citizens, who need protection from the threatening “others.”...
The aim of this paper is to explore political street art images as sequences in a dialogue that feeds from, and extends to, wider political discourse. The paper argues for the centrality and predominance of the visual in the way everyday political discourse is negotiated and in the process through which space is produced in the city. The images are...
Change is a constant condition of everyday life that we experience and transition through while often maintaining a sense of stability and continuity. But inevitably we come across disruptive changes that call into question the meanings we take for granted and thereby rupture life as we know it. How do those changes affect our rhythms of living? Ho...
This chapter explores memory as a constructive process occurring at the intersection of a person and their social-cultural world. To do this, it moves away from the traditional metaphor of memory as storage and develops the alternative metaphor of construction. The foundations for this approach are found in Lev Vygotsky’s theory of mediation and mi...
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KPIP4R7H6HJ8S3HXINHZ/full?target=10.1080/1472586X.2021.1876528
The interest in street art has long involved a wide range of urban visual expressions such as murals, graffiti, tagging, and even urban defacement. These diverse aesthetic forms of expression have therefore attracted numerous theoretical and methodological approaches. Some analyze it from the standpoint of street art as an illegal act of vandalism,...
Recent research on social movements have shown the significant role protest symbols play in mobilizing action and constructing a shared identity for a group pressing for social change. The present article gives an overview of crowd and social movement theories that focus on how symbols form and maintain groups. Borrowing from cultural psychology an...
This paper presents a theoretical and methodological approach to analysing images in public space as part of a transformative visual dialogue in everyday life. Images are conceptualised through the lens of sociocultural psychology and analytically approached through the metaphor of ‘the social life of images,’ by which the life cycle of images is f...
Conflict and dialogicality go hand in hand, in that every conflict calls for at least two possible and competing positions. This dialogical relationship takes place within an argumentative context characterized by the presence of different voices and storylines which ultimately compete to impose their own form of defining the conflict according to...
This chapter describes an extension of Bartlett’s method of repeated reproduction, using War of the Ghosts, into a conversation task. In order to force participants to naturalistically externalize their process of remembering (i.e., think aloud), they were asked to recall the story with another person. Analysis shows the processes that lead to many...
Bartlett’s method of repeated reproduction is used to study the mediation of two different narrative forms of the same story about Northern Ireland (reading condition as independent variable, pro-British version vs. pro-Irish version) on the subsequent recall of its contents (dependent variable), paying particular attention to those events prioriti...
Different social actors produce urban images to represent and propagate particular versions of social reality. These images are in turn interpreted, transformed, reconstructed, and destroyed by other social actors in a continuous process of negotiating collective memory and the power of representing it in the public space. The study in this chapter...
Memorials are public sites that promote memory of the collective past. Over the last century, a new “counter-memorial” form has emerged that focused on victims and trauma through a minimalist and immersive architecture that many have claimed opens up for a diversity of ways of experiencing and interacting with them. This idea is then tested at the...
The idea that memory is constructive is now widely accepted in psychology as well as across the different disciplines within memory studies. However, what precisely this means is not always clear and has often been used to save the storage metaphor of memory. This chapter reviews the theories of Vygotsky and Bartlett, and the lines of research that...
All human knowledge is ultimately rooted in metaphorical (or analogical) modes of perception and thought, wherein one thing is used to understand another. Thus, metaphors permeate our everyday language structuring and our understanding of life, relationships, communication, politics, and even science. Scientists use metaphors to construct theoretic...
Book Review:
Understanding media semiotics (second edition)
Written by Marcel Danesi
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1472586X.2019.1673001?scroll=top&needAccess=true
This brief charts out principles for a cultural psychology of remembering. The idea at its core is a conceptualization of remembering as a constructive process--something that occurs at the intersection of a person and their social-cultural world. To do this, it moves away from the traditional metaphor of memory as storage and develops the alternat...
Protests and social upheavals are complex phenomena that are hard to predict in advance but, in hindsight, lead us to ask what factors led people to protest. Even in stable authoritarian re- gimes with no visible opposition, there are always hidden, ev- eryday forms of resistance to power that can, under the right conditions, transform into open re...
This chapter looks at the capacity of communities to come together in times of rupture and imagine a collective future that promises better living conditions. We will address the process by which individuals assembled beyond the Egyptian uprising in 2011 and experimented with their aspired social change, through analyzing three case studies of coop...
This chapter focuses on the interrelation between resistance, novelty and social change. We will consider resistance as both a social and individual phenomenon, as a constructive process that articulates continuity and change and as an act oriented towards an imagined future of different communities. In this account, resistance is thus a creative a...
Open access: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354067X17695769
This article looks at how symbols in the urban environment are intentionally produced and modified to regulate a community’s collective memory. Our urban environment is filled with symbols in the form of images, text, and structures that embody certain narratives about the past. Once those symbols are introduced into the city space they take a life...
The world we live in today is defined more by borders and walls than by common spaces. Mental and physical barriers separate us from them. They divide those in power from the masses, and separate people by nationality, ideology, and identity, thus marginalizing all those who do not conform to the societal norm. But these barriers, no matter how con...
‘Street Art of Resistance’ … is a definitive collection of essays; it has case studies from Belfast to Egypt, art forms ranging from murals to tattoos, and insights that are both theoretical and practical. Street art is a way for suppressed voices to gain representation in the public sphere. These voices combine the power of art to challenge assump...
This is a longitudinal study of the identity process through times of dramatic social change. Using a narrative psychological approach this research follows the life stories of five Egyptian bloggers as they write their stories on online blogs over the course of the three years following the 2011 revolution, at which time Egypt has witnessed major...
Cultural Psychology offers a new approach to imagination which brings its emotional, social, cultural, contextual and existential characteristics to the fore. In this approach, fantasy and imagination are understood as the human capacity to distance oneself from the here-and-now situation in order to return to it with new possibilities. To do this...
The present chapter explores agency as a process of group creativity where individuals collaborate using signs with the aim of changing social reality. This is illustrated with a case study of the Egyptian street graffiti that emerged in the first year after protestors took to the streets on 25 January 2011 and on the artwork centered around Tahrir...
Projects
Projects (2)
We have just finished editing a special issue for "Culture & Psychology", following a workshop organised in Neuchâtel in June 2016. It will out in early to mid 2017.
Table of Contents:
1) Constructing memory
Picasso’s masks: Tracing the flow of cultural memory by Jens Brockmeier, The American University of Paris
False Memories of Epistemic Consensus by Steve Brown & Paula Reavey, University of Leceister
What Makes Memory Constructive?: A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments by Brady Wagoner, Aalborg University
Commentary by Sandra Obradovic, London School of Economics
2) Remembering conflicts
The role of collective memory in the context of protracted conflict in Israel/ Palestine by Cathy Nicholson, London School of Economics
Documenting a Forbidden Memory: Symbols in the changing city space of Cairo by Sarah Awad, Aalborg University
Commentary by Vlad Glăveanu, Aalborg University
3) Remembering and trajectories of living
Personal trajectories, collective memories: remembering and the life-course by Constance de Saint Laurent, University of Neuchâtel
The end into the beginning. Prolepsis and the reconstruction of the collective past by Ignacio Bresco de Luna, Aalborg University
Commentary by Tania Zittoun, University of Neuchâtel
This volume incorporates empirical research that showcases different creative forms of resistance from around the world, especially graffiti. It focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of resistance as can be found in graffiti, art, music, poetry, diaries and other creative cultural forms. Artistic acts of resistance are approached through the framework of cultural psychology, which explores the mutual constitution between persons and the social-cultural worlds to which they belong. From this perspective resistance is understood as (a) a social and individual phenomenon, (b) a constructive process that articulates continuity and change and (c) an act oriented towards an imagined future of different communities.
