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Biographical note: John Shotter is now an Emeritus Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, and has begun to work as a consultant with KCC International (Kensington Consultation Center). His long term interest is in the social conditions conducive to people having a voice in the development of participatory democracies and civil societies. He is the author of Images of Man in Psychological Research (Methuen, 1975), Human Action and its Psychological Investigation (with Alan Gauld, Routledge, 1977), Social Accountability and Selfhood (Blackwell, 1984), Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind (CP) (Open University Press and Toronto University Press, 1993), and Conversational Realities: the Construction of Life through Language (CR) (Sage, 1993). In 1997 he was an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge and a Visiting Professor at The Swedish Institute of Work Life Research, Stockholm, Sweden (see linked booklet written with Bjorn Gustavsen in 1999). He is a member of the Virtual Faculty where a number of writings since CP and CR are posted. See information also on the Discursive Therapy, Postgraduate Diploma being offered at Massey University, NZ, and the references there to relevant work in some of the course materials. He is also a member of the LDI Core Community (the Learning Development Organization) - see also papers posted on that site.

In recent times I have begun to look beyond current versions of Social Constructionism, toward the surrounding circumstances making such a movement possible. Indeed, many versions of Social Constructionism still seem to me to be deeply 'infected' with the Cartesianism that in fact they aim to overcome. They have not yet moved on from a world of dead, mechanically structured activities to a world of living, embodied beings, spontaneously responsive to each other. The move first to a focus on joint action, then to dialogically-structured or 'chiasmically organized' (see Merleau-Ponty, 1968) activities, is a central part of my interest in participatory modes of life and inquiry. In my "Social Accountability..." book, I called my approach a social ecological one, and it is to this approach that I have returned. I will be posting my recent writing along these lines below.

ADDRESS: Department of Communication, Horton Social Science Center, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824-3586, U.S.A. e-mail jds@hypatia.unh.edu

List of Publications and Conferences, etc.:

Some biographical details and an outline of my Research program.

SOME WRITINGS IN THE RECENT PAST:

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