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.

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.

In Dialogic Self Theory (DST), interactional multiplicity manifests itself in dynamics of space and time, in which the self is understood as a dynamic process of internalization and externalization of collective meanings (Berteau, 2012). When we study the self in education and other spaces, the idea of territory as a passive setting, a mere backdrop for human action, still persists. However, we need to understand spaces as pulsating territories of meanings that channel, as alterities, the relational experience of subjects, delimiting their agency and projections for the future. According to Hermans (2015, p. 94), “the spatialization of dialogical relations allows for the treatment of a particular idea in the context of both interior and exterior dialogues, creating ever changing perspectives.” The objective of this work is to investigate how the multivocality of the self is experienced and negotiated by students in their developmental trajectories. The discussion is based on the theory of the Dialogical Self and is illustrated by two case studies: the first, based on narratives from a quilombola student on academic mobility abroad, and the second, which presents data from a culture circle composed of girls from a rural school. The analyses demonstrate how different voices and positions of self emerge in response to tensions caused by spatial scenarios and are renegotiated in the encounter of stories. By integrating spatiality into the TSD approach, this work expands the theoretical rigor of the field and provides a basis for a decolonial scientific perspective. The relevance of the work lies in valuing the role of territorial diversity in the constitution of the dialogical self, ensuring that human development is understood in its situated and relational complexity.

My dissertation inquiries into Palestinian-American high school students’ perceptions of self. I wanted to capture how they expressed their vibrancy, complexities, and nuance, Yet, I encountered a methodological problem as I couldn’t adequately contextualize their cultural, social, and even religious backgrounds, “many scholars often struggle to conceptualize or articulate that problem and complexity” (Tesar, 2020, p. 224). Present methodologies, I found, didn’t capture the complexities weaving throughout and in-between the spatial, temporal, physical, and emotional contexts between their global and local connections.

The wobble spurred by this problem nudged me. Wobble “is a calling to attention, a provocation of response” (Fecho, 2011, p. 70). This impulse can “lead to creative insights or activities” (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 122). I believed I could expand narrative methodologies, but I felt I was flying to close to the sun. My ambition to create conflicted with my ability to execute. As Hackett et al., (2018) claim, “good academic research should push boundaries, and experiment with ways of thinking that have not been thought” (p. 486). My initiation to create qissas as a methodology responds to the invitation for “scholars to create their own unique, creative paths based on the issue at hand, in relationship with ourselves and others, interanimated with dialogic thought” (White & Janfada, 2025, p. 45).

I will present how qissas invokes a Bakhtinian dialogical philosophy of an ‘ideological becoming’ that explores the multiplicities and diversities of Arab-American individuals. This dialogic impulse also extends, diversifies, and adds range to research on Arab Americans that has so often portrayed them through narrow perspectives. Furthermore, as a narrative methodology, qissas implores critical researchers to examine how Arab individuals are continuously shaped, reshaped by the social world and other context they live in through its storytelling function.