Chapter 10: The Perfect Psytizen: Sociohistorical Debts and the Limits of Psychology as Engineering for Democracy

This global age is often subjected to fluctuations in the accommodation of or tension between universal concurrence and local differences, familiarity and incognizance, proximity, and distance. Constant and ever more intense cultural encounters, contacts, interactions, exchanges and cross-breeding are changing our everyday experience of ourselves and others. An obvious outcome of such processes is their deep implications for how we understand who we are and why we are in this world (Bhatia, 2002, 2007; Canclini, 2015; Gergen, 1991; Valsiner, 2014). With all this change, which entails highly complex, more or less swift and “fluent” individual and social transformation (Bauman, 2005; Kymilcka, 1995; Ong, 2006), terms such as “citizenship” and “democracy” and the concomitant concern about the political subject’s rights and duties, have erupted forcefully onto political and scientific reflection over the last decade. These issues have been broached from different fields of knowledge and in connection with matters of mutual concern such as identity, migration or postcolonial studies (see, for instance, Grundy & Jamieson, 2007; Hansen & Stepputat, 2005; Kymlicka, 2004; Podsakoff, Mackenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000; Shore, 2004).