Marsico G. (2015). Mind the Borders!

This special issue of Psychology & Society was compiled by guest editor Giuseppina Marsico from the University of Salerno, Italy. The special issue is aimed at exploring, from the theoretical and empirical points of view, the concept of border in contemporary cultural psychology. Borders is an innovative multidisciplinary theoretical construct that is raising interest in human and social sciences. Different psycho-social processes can be explored and understood focusing on what happens on the border. From the perspective of cultural psychology, borders are the outcome of culturally organized processes which are not fixed, but based on a continuous organization and reorganization of I-Other-World relationships. The special issue has managed to be interdisciplinary in the discussions of the border notion, promoting an enrichment for different areas of psychology and neighboring disciplines. Thus, on the pages of the journal one can find the interplay between different fields of research in contemporary psychology and the efforts to explain the notion of the border in its interface between art and science (see Lorderlo), from a clinical point of view (see Nassar), in between performing arts and cultural psychology (see Morais & Silva Guimarães), and in relation to discourse analysis (see Hermansen). Two other papers (see Carrè and Santana da Silva) complement and expand, in a wider theoretical perspective, the ideas discussed by the authors. Cultural psychology plays a crucial role not only in linking different scientific discourses, but also in supporting the synthesis of new ideas and in feeding new research practices towards a further development of the field.