Social Representations, Alternative Representations and Semantic Barriers

Abstract

Social representations research has tended to focus upon the representations that groups have in relation to some object. The present article elaborates the concept of social representations by pointing to the existence of "alternative representations" as sub-components within social representations. Alternative representations are the ideas and images the group has about how other groups represent the given object. Alternative representations are thus representations of other people's representations. The present article uses data from Moscovici's (1976Moscovici's ( /2008 analysis of the diffusion of psychoanalysis to examine how people engage with alternative representations. It is demonstrated that there can be more or less dialogical relations with alternative representations. The analysis concludes by considering seven "semiotic barriers" which work to neutralise the dialogical potential of alternative representations, thus on the one hand enabling groups to talk about the views of others, while, on the other hand, remaining unchallenged by those views.

Identity and acculturation: The case of naturalised citizens in Britain

“…Semantic barriers may inhibit the dialogue between different social representations (Gillespie, 2008). For instance, stigmatisation poses a barrier to engaging with alternative representations by otherising the groups that construct these representations.…”

Power Struggles in the Remembering of Historical Intergroup Conflict: Hegemonic and Counter-Narratives About the Argentine “Conquest of the Desert”

“…At the same time, their stories also call for a newly elaborated version, their own perspective on their culture-a piece that has been invisible and, indeed, negated, within the hegemonic framework. As the two women burst out laughing when they say "people are always surprised when we tell them we have cellphones, as though Indians should just have boleadoras," their mocking of the alternative hegemonic representation reflects what Gillespie (2008) has labeled bracketing, a discursive strategy that conveys both acknowledgment and critical resistance. Nevertheless, their discourse makes it evident that while they recognize that version of themselves as not their own version but as the view that others have of them and mock it, they also, at times, grab on to and appropriate that representation, or pieces of it.…”

“…Rather, when a dominant social group becomes aware of the presence of an alternative representation, as might be the case with the ongoing existence of indigenous people, their members develop different semantic barriers (Gillespie 2008) in their discourse to defend their own representations, keeping them away from the dialogical exchange. Indeed, the use of the past tense in the teacher's discourse and the negation of the ongoing existence of indigenous people associated with the construction of an anachronic indigenous identity may be considered as instances of protective semantic barriers.…”

“…Importantly, as social groups construct their own discourse about the social world, they also adapt to or resist other groups' discourse. To know the outgroup's discourse is to know how those individuals think of "us"; in other words, such discourse makes one aware of the existence of alternative representations of the self (Gillespie 2008). The representations of the different perspectives about ourselves are an important dialogical sub-part of our identity and allow individuals to deal with the plurality of representations about themselves.…”

Conflict Transformation and History Teaching: Social Psychological Theory and Its Contributions

“…This dynamic helps us understand the mechanisms behind the phenomenon of resistance (Duveen 2001) when microgenetic processes (Duveen and lloyd 1990;Psaltis 2015b) of engagement with alternative perspectives and representations of the past are made possible but often undermined by the use of semantic barriers who defend the self from change (Gillespie 2008(Gillespie , 2015.…”