Abstract
Transemics is a process that applies widely in psychology and allied disciplines. It is a transactional process of exchange, transformation, and dialectical inter-digitation at the level of globality/ universality, whole vs. individuality, and specificity/ part. The term is novel to psychology, and has been rarely used in scholarship generally. Transemics appears critical to general psychology and extends the concept to indigenous psychologies, aspects of culture work, and humanization. One section of the present work gives greater detail on transemics, including on its domains, processes, terms, and theorizing. An ensuing section gives details on its mechanisms, including on scale, change, scope, quality, levels, and context. The present work shows the similarities and differences with related terms, such as reciprocal causality and circular emergence. Transemics represents a new way of envisioning the constitutive participation of individuals, peoples, cultures, and societal institutions in their transactions and relationships in their growth process, and it could help understand the mechanisms of how that can become entrenched, go awry, regress, and so on. The paper concludes with the concepts of transemification and narrativization in transemics, giving hypothetical examples.
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Young, G. Transemic processes in psychology and beyond: From the general to the specific and back again. Curr Psychol 42, 19861–19880 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03083-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03083-1