This Master’s pillar offers a sociocultural psychological perspective for the study of lifelong learning and development to address a wide range of current issues:

• Development: the study of psychological development, life trajectories and transitions experienced by individuals of all ages (linked to school, family, migration, employment, retirement, etc.) ;
• Utopias: intervention and transformation methodologies at work, in learning situations, and more generally, in the context of social innovation – particularly utopian methods.
• Imagination: individual and collective imagination, in personal and social development, and in our relationship with nature; the role of the arts, theater, dance, music and fiction in learning, research and development;
• Learning: the opportunities and challenges of formal and informal learning, at school, at work or in everyday life; the assessment and design of institutional frameworks (e.g., vocational, therapeutic, integration, etc.), aimed at different publics (e.g., people from migrant backgrounds, the elderly, etc.).

The specialization in psychology and education in the Neuchâtel Master’s in Social Sciences is unique in Switzerland and Europe:

• It is a unique Master’s degree in sociocultural psychology, at the crossroads of education sciences and psychology. Sociocultural psychology examines the dialogical dynamics by which the individual and his or her social and cultural environment mutually constitute each other, and emphasizes the symbolic nature of these situations;
• The Master is not linked to a national psychology curriculum; it is not oriented towards clinical psychology, and is open to students from different countries and backgrounds;
• The Master is interdisciplinary, to foster the ability to study complex socio-cultural phenomena. The specialization is part of a Master’s in Social Sciences, attached to the Centre for the Understanding of Social Processes (MAPS), which coordinates research and teaching activities in anthropology, sociology, regional economics, geography, psychology and education, and the Swiss Forum for Migration Studies (SFM). The Center encourages interdisciplinary collaborations in which students are involved (for example, in science and psychology to study conservation, in anthropology and education to study education in refugee camps, etc.).