ABSTRACT
In human sciences, and particularly in social psychology, the notion of intervention is acknowledged as a practice that corresponds to an explicit and intentional project of a deliberate act of change. Differing from application, as we will see further on, intervention is based on research aiming at determining, on various levels, all the elements of a field in which the activity of an individual or collective subject is carried out, in order to encourage transformation, to the benefit of the latter (Dubost 2007). It can have, in this regard, a non-conformist, reformative, or adaptive purpose. This chapter puts forward some reflections of a theoretical nature on the means through which the study of social representations (SRs) can articulate itself with intervention practices. After having considered the forms that intervention takes, I intend to show that they all implicitly or explicitly refer to a certain knowledge of social representations and, in most cases, to an act upon them. Following, I will suggest a model for the analysis of social representations found in the space of concrete life, thus allowing an organic connection between its study and the practices of intervention.
