Between Shadows and Specters: Socioemotional Well-Being in University Life Projects through a Semiotic-Cultural Lens
- Author (as listed in source)
- Cristian Jofré-Barrera
- Venue (source-reported)
- Springer
- Status (source-reported, not externally verified)
- In editing
This work is not yet published. Stage and venue are reported by the author. Bibliographic details come from the author’s CV and have not been externally verified.
This chapter questions models that equate socioemotional well-being with inner coherence, planning and control, which miss students' chronic liminality. From a cultural-semiotic view it reconceives well-being as tensegrity of the Self: integrity-in-tension between normativities and possibilities, enabled by imagination as co-genetic poiesis. The present is shaped by shadow trajectories of the unlived past and by specters of the future, such as AI and social media. It proposes institutional care that scaffolds reflective meaning-making across transitions.
Socioemotional well-being is cast as inner coherence, driven by individual planning and control. This approach fails to grasp students’ experience of chronic liminality, where uncertainty is inherent to development (Turner, 1969). From a cultural–semiotic view, we reconceive well-being as tensegrity of the Self—integrity-in-tension emerging from the capacity to productively sustain tensions between normativities and possibilities (Valsiner, 2002). Enabled by imagination—conceived as co-genetic poiesis (Tateo, 2017) nourished by cultural resources (Zittoun, 2016)—that pleromatizes gaps and re-semiotizes experience, the present is co-determined by shadow trajectories of the not-lived past and by “specters of the future”: artifacts and discourses—e.g., artificial intelligence and social media—that pre-delimit possibilities and impossibilities (Boulanger, 2021). We critically engage self-efficacy and life-design models that, by valorizing linear planning, overlook the adaptive function of fragmentation. Accordingly, well-being is the capacity to inhabit ambiguity, with implications for university policy: shifting from predefined goals to cultivating students’ capacities to live meaningfully within irreversible time (Valsiner, 2014). In this frame, fields of affective semiosis color directionality and value hierarchies, orienting action without fixing endpoints, thus preserving openness. Such a shift reframes institutional care: from scripting futures to scaffolding reflective, culturally mediated meaning-making across transitions amid ongoing uncertainty.
Keywords: Socioemotional well-being; Chronic liminality; Tensegrity of the self; Affective semiosis; Shadow trajectories and future specters