Fremstilling af motiver

Tiltrædelsesforelæsning 12. august 2022

Abstract

This text is the manuscript for my inaugural lecture as professor of educational psychology at the graduate School of Education, Aarhus University, August 2022, with an epilogue added. The lecture largely reproduces main points from the book I publish in 2023, ‘Rearticulating Motives’. First, it is put in the context of the current crisis of the humanities, where this department is claimed to have special potential because we represent a form of socio-cultural theory that relates to practice - where standardizing forms of knowledge dominate, but leave an unmet need for synthesizing, reflexive, dialogic and creative competences. I argue that these potentials must be actualized by maintaining an ideal of objectivity, rather than settling for concepts that only signal abstract negations. Next, I discuss the question of objectivity in motivational psychology, where the paradoxical project of making the subjective objective is most often realized as a 'boundary objectivity', with concepts that form a relay (e.g. 'energy') and hide their disciplinary and/or utopian function. Against this, a meta-objectivity is proposed, as a 'post-psychological' reflection of different forms of knowledge and re-/presentation. The last part of the lecture unfolds that perspective by analyzing practical re-/presentations of motives, in aesthetic activities such as care for and with young drug users. Aesthetics is considered a way to meta-reflect on activities and motives, including also going beyond the framework of 'treatment' (e.g. of 'addiction') in the direction of wider communities of care with more diverse configurations of meaning and sense.

Keywords
Inauguration, motivation, aesthetics, objectivity, rearticulation