This chapter operates in four main movements. First, it presents the Vineyard region: its geographical features, its political organisation, its demography and the inhabitants, and a few relevant facts about its cultural history that help situate its current transformation. Second, it presents the genesis of the new ‘medico-social plan’ that frames the policies of housing and ageing in the region and thus reshapes the landscape of care. Third, it retraces the movements of its recent evolution, from its planning to its implementations, with its various setbacks. The dialogical position of the researchers, and their potential role in these changes, are finally discussed. A short synthesis closes the chapter.

In his ambitious project of a genetic social psychology, Charis Psaltis proposes to integrate various strands of psychology around a case study, along the tripartite concepts of sociogenesis, microgenesis and ontogenesis. The case study is that of Cyprus and its long-standing division, and the analysis aims at integrating the sociogenesis of the social representations of the outgroup – Greek Cypriots vs Turkish Cypriots, the microgenesis of intergroup contacts and the ontogenetic narrative of his own biographical trajectory. In this chapter I first propose to retrace three variations of the tripartite model, and I highlight conceptual ambiguities they maintain around the issues of affects and their model of the subject. Second, I indicate how sociocultural psychology has developed in parallel to the genetic social psychology proposed, and how both approaches seem to concur on the importance of studying complex case studies. Third, drawing on the two previous points, I emphasise the role of affects in the case study reported by Psaltis, and I argue that it needs an adequate model of the person. I finally conclude than a better integration of the two lines of theorisation may lead us to a richer theory of human development.