Denise Jodelet

Denise Jodelet is a French social psychologist with particular expertise in social representation theory and socio-cultural psychology.

Career
Jodelet began her research career in 1965 at the Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris working with Serge Moscovici. In 1991 she succeeded Moscovici as Director of the Laboratoire for eleven years. During her time at EHESS she supervised forty doctoral dissertations. She developed and maintained strong collaboration with researchers in Latin America. She retired as Director of Studies (Emeritus) at the EHESS. She was President of the Serge Moscovici World Network.

Research
Inspired by Moscovici's work on social representation theory she further developed it both theoretically and empirically. She took it in an innovative direction in her early research which was concerned with exploring the social dynamics within a rural French community which provided accommodation for adults with mental health problems. Jodelet adopted an ethnographic approach spending considerable time within the community getting to know the residents and how they organised their daily routines. From this she developed a sophisticated understanding of how mental illness was represented in the community not only in language but also in everyday practices. Her work was granted a doctorate in 1985 and subsequently published initially in French (1989) and then in English (1991). This work formed the beginnings of her rapprochement between social psychology and anthropology and the development of a more socio-cultural psychology.

She subsequently conducted research on the application of social representation theory in the fields of the environment, education, the body and health.

In 2008, a collection of essays was published in her honour.

Honours

 * Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques
 * Doctor Honoris Causa at University of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Luján, Quilmes (Argentina), Rio de Janeiro, João Pessoa, Paraíba (Brazil), Panteion University (Greece), Guadalajara (Mexico)
 * Honorary Member, Association of Psychology and Psychiatry of Adults and Children, Greek Association of United Nations

Books

 * Jodelet, D., Viet, J., & Besnard, P. (1970). La psychologie sociale, une discipline en mouvement. Paris-LaHaye: Mouton.
 * Jodelet, D. (1989). Folies et représentations sociales. Paris: PUF. (Translation by T. Pownall, Madness and social representations. Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1991.)
 * Jodelet, D. (ed.) (1989). Les represéntations sociales. Paris: PUF.
 * Jodelet, D. (2016). Représentations sociales et mondes de vie (edited by Nikos Kalampalikis). Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines.
 * Jodelet, D., Vala, J., & Drozda-Senkowska (eds.) (2020). Societies under threat: A pluri-disciplinary approach. Cham: Springer.

Chapters

 * Jodelet, D. (1984). The representation of the body and its transformations. In R. Farr & S. Moscovici (eds.) Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 * Jodelet, D. (1987). The study of people-environment relations in France. In D. Stokols & I. Altman (eds.) Handbook of Environmental Psychology. New York: Wiley.
 * Jodelet, D. (1993). Relationship between indigenous psychologies and social representations. In J. Berry & U. Kim (eds.) Indigenous Psychologies. Los Angeles: Sage.

Articles

 * Jodelet, D. (2008). Social representations: The beautiful invention. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 38 (4), 411–430.
 * Jodelet, D. (2011). Returning to past features of Serge Moscovici's theory to feed the future. Papers on Social Representations, 20 (2), 39.1-39.11.
 * Jodelet, D. (2021). The notion of common and social representations. RUDN Journal of Psychology and Pedagogics, 18 (2), 299–314.