Open University The Netherlands

Faculty Member, Psychology

Associate Professor

About

My primary interest and background is cultural psychology. In cooperation with both Cor Baerveldt and Paul Voestermans, I try to put forward a psychological theory of culture that is rooted in Enactivism (see Varela, Maturana, Thompson, Rosch).

In this perspective, culture is never considered a causal operant, a force, or some other 'factor' that influences human behavior. At best, culture is perceived in the eyes of an observer as recognizable regularities in the behavior of individuals. The question remains how these regularities come about.

Enactive Cultural Psychology provides an answer that starts from autonomous, autopoietic living systems. A key concept is their consensual coordination of actions, which are from the outset fundamentally embodied and fundamentally social. The enactive framework shows how meaning and language occur as higher-order consensual coordinations of actions. [note that in enactive thinking, 'consensual' does not refer to some sort of discursive agreement but has a special connotation.]

I teach Cultural Psychology, and History of Psychology. Next to this, I am the project leader for the course on Philosophy of Psychology; all at the Open University in the Netherlands.

At the Netherlands' Laboratory for Life Long Learning (NeLLL), affiliated with the Open University, I am the program manager that is responsible for Line 3: Implicit Learning and Implicit Knowledge

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