Conference Agenda

This study investigates how Brazilian women educators construct meanings about body, femininity, and identity through dialogical processes shaped by colonial histories and racialized structures. Grounded in Dialogical Self Theory and informed by decolonial, feminist, and cultural-historical perspectives, the research adopts collective image-reading as a methodological strategy to access embodied and culturally mediated I-positions. The approach assumes that the body is not a neutral site but a locus where coloniality, gender norms, and racial hierarchies are inscribed and reproduced, making it impossible to dissociate the dialogical self from Brazil’s history of structural racism. Methodologically, the study draws on conversation circles in which participants interpreted visual artworks depicting female figures. These collective readings functioned as dialogical spaces where voices confronted, complemented, and reconfigured one another. The method integrates Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism and exotopy, emphasizing how participants complete the artwork from their situated perspectives, and aligns with decolonial methodologies that privilege embodied knowledge, relationality, and the disruption of white-centric epistemic frames. The use of visual artifacts as mediators allowed participants to externalize internal dialogues, activate cultural models, and articulate tensions between imposed femininities and lived bodily experiences. Theoretically, the study bridges Dialogical Self Theory with decolonial thought by demonstrating that self-formation is inseparable from histories of racialization, gendered violence, and social inequality. The dialogical self emerges as a dynamic configuration of voices shaped by cultural repertoires, emotional socialization, and embodied memories that carry the marks of coloniality. The results show that collective image-reading elicited I-positions related to suffering, resistance, fragmentation, and agency. Participants connected the artworks to experiences of gendered and racialized violence, revealing how cultural artifacts reorganize the self and make visible the entanglement of identity, history, and power. The method proved effective in generating transformative dialogical spaces where embodied selves could be recognized, negotiated, and reimagined.