Conference Agenda

This study explores career development among Japanese business professionals by examining how they experience internal conflict and internal dialogue while learning and working in different linguistic and cultural environments. The focus is on how such experiences are described and understood over time. The participants had no overseas upbringing or special foreign language backgrounds. All began their careers in Japan and later encountered turning points through which they voluntarily moved into overseas or intercultural work contexts.

Multiple in-depth interviews were conducted with four Japanese business professionals. Based on their narratives, Trajectory Equifinality Modeling (TEM) was used to describe their career development processes over time, identifying bifurcation points, obligatory passage points, and relevant social forces. Dialogical Self Theory (DST) as proposed by Hermans was then employed to examine how internal dialogues unfolded across different phases of these processes, with attention to experiences of movement and tension in intercultural contexts.

The analysis showed that participants repeatedly experienced internal conflicts—understood here as lived contradictions—such as tensions between seeking challenges and desiring stability, between responding to others’ expectations and following their own orientations, and between cultural understanding and professional competence. These contradictions became salient at moments of cultural friction, linguistic difficulty, and career transition. Rather than being resolved, they were experienced as ongoing tensions that were negotiated through internal dialogue among multiple I-positions, through which participants reconsidered their values, working styles, and positioning over time.

By using TEM and DST in combination, this study offers a way of understanding career development in intercultural contexts as a non-linear process characterized by polyphony and equifinality. The findings highlight career development not only as adaptation or achievement, but also as an ongoing re-positioning of the self-shaped through internal dialogue among Japanese business professionals working across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

This autoethnographic study explores the construction of professional identity as a cultural and dialogical process within the experience of a Black university student navigating higher education. Grounded in Cultural Psychology andin Dialogical Self Theory the work examines how symbolic mediations, narrative meaning-making, and internal dialogues shape the ongoing formation of the self in academic contexts marked by racialization. Drawing on systematic self-reflection, memory work, field notes, and narrative reconstruction, the analysis follows autoethnographic principles that position lived experience as both data and interpretative lens.

The narrative traces critical moments of tension between multiple I-positions such as I as a student, I as a future professional, and I as a Black subject revealing how encounters with institutional expectations, racial dynamics, and professional aspirations triggered processes of rupture, reflection, and symbolic reorganization. These dialogical tensions functioned not as obstacles but as developmental catalysts, fostering new self-understandings and reconfigurations of professional belonging through new I positions emergences.

Through this cultural-psychological and dialogical self-theory perspective, professional identity emerges as a dynamic narrative continuously negotiated across educational spaces and in interactions between I-positions. The autoethnographic account highlights how becoming a professional intertwines with becoming racially conscious, demonstrating that identity development is deeply embedded in sociocultural experience and mediated by meaning-making practices. By situating personal experience within broader cultural processes, this study contributes to understanding how racialized trajectories in higher education shape the formation of professional selves and underscores the value of autoethnography as a rigorous methodological approach for investigating developmental phenomena.

This study proposes a methodological approach for examining how a creative vision emerging in long-term creative practice becomes recognized, questioned, and embodied through developmental processes. Particular attention is given to intra-personal dialogue involving non-verbal creative artifacts, which remains underexplored within dialogical self research.

The study applies Auto-TEM (Autobiographical Trajectory Equifinality Modeling) to the author’s creative life from early childhood (age 5) to adulthood (age 40). By focusing on negotiations with contradictions at key turning points, the trajectory is divided into phases. Transitions of the dialogical self are analyzed through TEM diagrams to explore how I-positions and voices emerge, interact, and reorganize across time.

Building on Konopka et al.’s composition-work research—including efforts to access implicit and “unspeakable” I-positions through material composition—this study introduces a methodological variation in which creative artifacts themselves are treated analytically as symbolic voices. Rather than externalizing inner states, creative works are approached as mediating elements that participate in dialogical positioning processes.

The analysis suggests that pre-conceptual creative experiences received with strong affective impact sustain dialogical tension across temporal and contextual shifts. Such experiences sediment as enduring questions that reappear through subsequent creative practice, shaping the emergence and activation of I-positions while contributing to the ongoing individuation of creative vision.

Overall, the study demonstrates how combining dialogical self theory with Auto-TEM makes it possible to investigate creative vision formation as an ongoing process of embodied positioning and dialogical individuation.

The project focuses on the English language use of first-generation, Spanish-speaking college students in the New York City area. The students are enrolled in an additive bilingual program designed to support academic work in Spanish during the first years of college while developing English for academic purposes.

The bilingual students participated in a daily, check-in survey over several weeks, reporting where they used English (speaking, listening, reading, writing, etc.) across diverse contexts, including home environments, peer interactions, community spaces, digital activities, workplaces, and educational settings. For each context, participants indicate with whom they used English, what communicative activities they engaged in, how long these interactions lasted, and how English was positioned relative to Spanish (English-only, mixed use, Spanglish, or primarily non-English). Throughout the study, students were engaged as co-researchers by regularly reviewing summaries of their own weekly language use (e.g., time spent using English across contexts and activities) and, in follow-up interviews, reflecting on and discussing patterns in their language use.

This ecological methodology maps how English use is distributed across the full range of students’ everyday lives over time. Extending dialogical self research on I-positions and it-positions, the project examines how patterns of English use relate both to students’ embodied, personally meaningful stances in everyday life – e.g., positioning oneself as changing one’s life circumstances, becoming financially stable, building a different future from one’s parents, or striving for independence and self-direction – and to generic institutional and cultural it-positions -- e.g., framing college, work, or mobility as something one simply “has to do” in order to succeed, follow the expected path, or meet expectations. By tracing English use across these positions, the study reveals how English becomes differentially associated with particular existential life projects and socially available narratives about success, social mobility, obligation, belonging, and enjoyment of English use itself.