Conference Agenda

This paper advances dialogicality as a praxis of decolonisation by bringing Dialogical Self Theory (DST) into critical conversation with Social Representations Theory (SRT). Rather than treating dialogue as a methodological tool or communicative ideal, the paper conceptualizes dialogicality as an epistemic, ethical, and political practice through which colonial forms of knowledge, subjectivity, and legitimacy are contested and reworked. Drawing on SRT, it argues that coloniality persists through dominant social representations that stabilise binaries, hierarchies, and norms of intelligibility, shaping both institutional knowledge and the internal organisation of the self. Building on the framework of a previous study titled, "Acts from the cracks: Representations and positions of the decolonial in the geopolitical (de)construction of power-entangled knowledge" (Ali et al., 2025) the paper conceptualises the “crack” as a dialogical space where hegemonic representations lose coherence and alternative meanings can emerge. These cracks are not external to representation but internal to representational systems themselves, arising through contradiction, ambivalence, and lived dissonance. Through a dialogical lens, such moments are understood as sites where multiple I-positions engage with, resist, and rearticulate dominant social representations, revealing the unfinished and contested nature of meaning-making. Decolonisation is thus framed not as a clean epistemic fissure, but as an ongoing dialogical struggle within and against inherited representational fields. The paper demonstrates how dialogicality enables subjects to inhabit tension without premature resolution, allowing marginalized, ancestral, and embodied knowledges to enter dialogue with dominant epistemologies without being assimilated or erased. In this sense, dialogical praxis operates simultaneously at the intrapersonal level (through negotiations among I-positions), the intersubjective level (through contested representations), and the institutional level (through challenges to epistemic authority). Ultimately, the paper positions dialogicality as a decolonial praxis that transforms both the conditions of knowledge production and the subjectivities through which knowledge is lived.