The Taos Institute

05/28/2026

WorldShare Book Feature:

Social Accountability & Selfhood by John Shotter

This book tackles anew some of the most fundamental questions in psychology. What, as human beings, are we to one another? How should we treat one another as being? In what ways do we learn about our world?

John Shotter argues that our reality is constituted for us by the ways in which we render our activities accountable to one another in our daily social lives. Similarly, our ways of understanding and experiencing ourselves are a product of our learning to give acceptable accounts of ourselves to others; of our learning as children how to become persons, able to communicate about the world around us in a manner comprehensible to other persons. Social psychologists should recognize that accountability is the basis of social life. In making his case John Shotter poses a radical challenge to all naively empirical theories of psychology.

https://www.taosinstitutecommons.com/spaces/14492163/content

05/25/2026

Reimagining Child Protection: Constructing Different Realities Through International Dialogue with Harlene
Anderson
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7oP36IhRlukSfGr0vHE5Ii?si=ZBwEdoxtQjus5Pvm8TEqew

This episode is the second in The Relational Turn, a six-episode podcast that journeys into the heart of human connection — where conversation becomes transformation, and relationships become the foundation for social change.

Hosted by Monica Sesma, Rocio Chaveste, the International Certificate in Collaborative and Dialogic Practices (ICCP) Program Directors and sponsored by the Taos Institute, this series invites listeners into generative, transdisciplinary dialogues that blur the boundaries between theory and practice, academia and community, and others.

The Relational Turn: Stories of Connection and Change · Episode

05/20/2026

WorldShare Books Feature:

The Discursive Turn in Social Psychology by Nikos Bozatzis and Thalia Dragonas

The present volume offers a ‘panoramic’ overview of the discursive turn in social psychology. Novel and previously published essays and positioning papers, side by side, introduce, outline and discuss key themes and approaches. Since its early days in the mid 1980s, the turn to discourse in social psychology has managed to enrich and re-orient, to a non negligible extent, the outlook of the discipline. This re-orientation pertains to the type of socio-psychological questions raised and empirically researched; it pertains, therefore, to the explicit and implicit theoretical and epistemological assumptions underpinning socio-psychological research.

Download a free copy in the Taos Institute Commons online community: https://www.taosinstitutecommons.com/spaces/14492163/content

05/13/2026

WorldShare Book Feature: The Social Construction of the Person, edited by Kenneth J. Gergen and Keith M. Davis

The Social Construction of the Person is a classic contribution to early developments in constructionist thought. Not only was it arguably the first visible marker of an emerging intellectual movement, but it demonstrated the broad sharing of constructionist ideas across the social sciences.

Download your copy in the Taos Institute Commons free online community: https://www.taosinstitutecommons.com/spaces/14492163/content

05/11/2026

The Taos Institute latest news, announcements, and resources are available: https://conta.cc/48HwubA

05/11/2026

We are gathering today in less than 1h!

https://www.taosinstitutecommons.com/posts/97622165

05/01/2026

In this webinar, Theresa Southam will be joined by research participants from her recently published book Transforming Trauma through Social Change: A Guide For Educators. Her research demonstrates how the characters in our books, participants in our research, and our own social worlds can change when they use relational practices. Sheila McNamee once asked, “How do we adopt a curiosity for ideas that are so different from our own?”. The characters in Theresa’s research do just that.

According to Wasserman and Fisher-Yoshida, storytelling methods like the Coordinated Management of Meaning engage not only people’s intellect, but also their feelings, helping them influence and shape their social worlds. Come discover how Theresa, her colleagues, and her research participants are connecting storytelling to research on inclusion, trust, and internationalization. You will meet some of the main characters from the book who are part of the , environmental, peace, multicultural, and intergenerational communities’ movements.

We invite you to join this session to explore how you might use stories to invoke social change.

https://www.taosinstitutecommons.com/posts/97622165?utm_source=manual

04/29/2026

WorldShare Book Feature: Strategising through Organising: Significance of Everyday Relational Sensemaking by Mette Vinther Larsen

This book sets out to study and understand how strategising and organising co-constitute each other through relational sensemaking. The object of the study is the relational interplay among eight managers in a medium-sized Danish cleaning company (the Company). The guiding assumption is that actors within an organisation construct meaning with each other on an everyday basis about the work situations they find themselves in and try to figure out how to act in sensible ways. The book contributes to the very active discussion within different research communities about what strategy is about. It especially contributes to the relational interplay between strategists and their strategising, which is characterises by a more process-oriented approach to strategy like the Strategy-as Practice community advocates. By working with and combining concepts like: relations, sensemaking, action, ‘generalised other’, significant others, meaning construction, gestures, positioning and story line within an organising, becoming, wayfinding and strategising perspective, I present a dynamic method and theoretical framework for understanding the co-constituting interplay between strategising and organising.

Download your free copy at https://www.taosinstitutecommons.com/spaces/14492163/content

04/24/2026

Welcome to The Relational Turn, a six-episode podcast that journeys into the heart of human connection — where conversation becomes transformation, and relationships become the foundation for social change.

Hosted by Monica Sesma, Rocio Chaveste, the International Certificate in Collaborative and Dialogic Practices (ICCP) Program Directors and sponsored by the Taos Institute, this series invites listeners into generative, transdisciplinary dialogues that blur the boundaries between theory and practice, academia and community, and others.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7KCvRfB55dUV5Z5QJctcfh

The Relational Turn: Stories of Connection and Change · Episode

04/21/2026

WorldShare Book Feature:

Therapeutic Realities: Collaboration, Oppression and Relational Flow by Kenneth J. Gergen

Social constructionist thought transforms psychotherapy, opening new vistas in understanding and practice. This work provides a brief introduction to social construction, and then illuminates the landscape of change. Special emphasis is given to topics of therapeutic communication, narrative, and therapeutic practices both traditional and contemporary. Critical chapters focus on the oppression of psychodiagnostic categories and the neuro/biological and pharmaceutical investments that support them. Additional chapters provide a range of insights into the poetics of therapy, collaborative practices with clients, and the broader flow of relationships in which therapy takes place. Lively discussions with therapy doyens, Mony Elkaim and Michael Hoyt, conclude the work. This book contains Kenneth Gergen’s major contributions to therapeutic thought and practice. Earlier writings are updated and orchestrated, and original chapters added to reflect his most recent thinking on therapy as a process of collaborative construction.

Download your free copy from the Taos Institute Commons online community: https://www.taosinstitutecommons.com/spaces/14492163/content