Comprehensive Approach of Representation and Action (ACRA)
The research group Comprehensive Approach of Representation and Action (ACRA) is led by Prof. Marie-Noëlle Schurmans.
Research Fields
Epistemology and methodology of research
Study of the conceptual and epistemological foundations of sociology, psychology, social anthropology and educational sciences in the perspective of their articulations, their specificity and their reciprocal borrowings. Articulation of determinist and actional perspectives from the angle of transcendental pragmatism. Methodology: research interview; construction, description and interpretation of datas; process of de-construction and reconstruction of the object; conquest of the object in a comprehensive perspective.
Articulation between representation and action
Three levels of questioning underlie this research field:
- Which features diversify the significations attributed singularly to the lived experience? Which collective representations, in a given social environment, focus on the concerned category of experiences and influence the singular interpretation of the lived experience ?
- How collective activity, which the singular action is part of ,take in charge the constraints and divergences which characterize the interpretations of experience?
- Can we build an innovative knowledge on the base of lived experience?
They respectively focus on several fields of application:
- Connections between illness and health: health education;
- Knowledge and intelligence: study of epistemologies underlying the different approaches on intelligence in socio-human sciences;
- Social cohesion: study of the dynamics of the collective counsciousness and its impact on the individual stands and on the orientation of action; problematic of the social integration and collective consciousness;
- Connections between theory and practice: study of the representations related with the diversity of contexts of action;
- Development of a model of biographic analysis;
- Implementation of the theorical model in the study of reproduction and production of the social cohesion.