Repairing the breach: identity narratives of a Latin American woman in Andalusia

Migration can be understood as a breach in life experience, creating a transition, and identity narratives as a strategy to repair this breach. Our study focuses on how two classical dilemmas that characterize this process are navigated in the narrative of migration of the participant (An Ecuadorian migrant woman in Andalusia): self versus others, and continuity of the self over time, despite changes. A semi-structured interview was conducted to achieve the objectives of the study. The interview was transcribed and analyzed on three axes: 1) Migration settings, identifying the dominant spaces of interaction where the migration narrative takes place; 2) Migration I-positions and voices, identifying the I-positions and voices involved in the narrative; and 3) Continuities and discontinuities in the identity narrative. The results demonstrated that the main settings and positions in the narrative were related to nationality, gender, and religion in relation to the dilemmas of self versus others and continuity versus change. These positions help the participant negotiate self-continuity in front of the changes associated with migration and the resistance against xenophobic discourses and positions in the host country. Results support the analysis of the transition processes associated to migration based on the concept of proculturation.

Embracing Diversity: the Complexities of Reckoning and Accepting Otherness

Many within society are working to address issues of otherness and the ways people discriminate against others in various ways such as racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and classism. In this paper we do not pretend to offer a solution, but we wish to add to the understanding of the complexities at play. We consider the importance of how our developmental negotiation and resolution of early childhood processes of separation and individuation incline us to adopt and move between four different existential-relational positions, each of which colors how we experience ourself in relation to our own self and to other selves. To illustrate how this can dynamically manifest in ways pertinent to the embrace of otherness, we draw on our experiences as psychological consultants to university students, administrators, and faculty.

Reification and the refugee: Using a counterposing dialogical analysis to unlock a frozen category

Thousands of individuals each year seek refugee status and the question of who can be accepted requires politicians within democracies to seek a public mandate. Unlike other socio-political categories individuals cannot self-identify as refugee; the category must be bureaucratically conferred. Therefore sustained humanitarian public concern is vital to the acceptance of refugees. This article sets parameters on this public concern. It examines how public narratives reify the refugee category. Showing how this reification constrains the citizenship, integration and opportunities of individuals, now safe, yet continually categorized in everyday public discourse as refugee. Interviews, focus groups (Study 1) and ethnography (Study 2) were conducted in Sweden and the United Kingdom (N = 57). The article introduces a counterposing dialogical analysis where public positioning of refugees is counterposed against dialogue by “refugees” anticipating their positioning. The analysis uncovers an hegemonic social representation of humanitarianism indexing “the refugee” as the passive recipient of help framed by a public narrative diachronically frozen in the initial act of flight. Three objectifying reification processes stabilize the category. “Refugees” in turn employ counter-positional tactics of distancing, compensation and future-orientation. The limited success of these tactics suggest the need to scale up such tactics to collective-level communication strategies. Success of communication strategies requires questioning the underlying function humanitarian-talk serves in creating a sense of European identity. Together these strategies could re-work the temporal features of the refugee category facilitating a repositioning and enabling the emergence of post-refugee narratives.

Adaptation in a dialogical perspective—From acculturation to proculturation

This article aims to provide a reconsideration of the adaptive processes unfolding while meeting novel cultural elements in a dialogical perspective. The mainstream acculturation studies are criticized for seeing sociocultural transformations in a mechanistic and essentialist way and the term of proculturation is proposed instead, to emphasize constructive and subjective nature of human adaptation to novelties. Proculturation develops when a person faces any kind of novelties. It is a continuous process. Each proculturative experience inevitably makes imprint on personality, as any meeting with new ideas is interpreted subjectively and becomes part of a cognitive and affective experience. Proculturation can be initiated even without leaving home as globalization and modern mass media spread cultural elements from culture to culture easily throughout the whole world. Cultures overlap and constitute worldwide web of meanings. I propose ways for the integration of dialogical self theory (DST) and social representation theory (SRT). The term of social representation should be integrated in DST by replacing the term of meta-position as they serve essentially the same meaning in their theories respectively. In this way, dialogical self (DS) obtains processual dimension mediating through the personal and societal processes. Human subjectivity is contemplated as the stem of a semiotically mediated system of persons, cultures, and societies.

Making things visible: The dialogical and the monological within the human nature

The present article gives a description and explanation of dialogical meaning of body in the dialogical approach by Mikhail Bakhtin, triggered by the dialogical perspective of the work by Prokopiou, Cline, and de Abreu (2012). Our image of the self is roughly joined with the meaning of our body and its parts. Visibility of the body and its regulation through cultural means may be explained though the dialogical relation, where the presence of the “other” makes possible to perceive the self and the body entirely. The special accent is made on the meaning of the border in human life, and especially in terms of body and its modifications. Stressing attention on the colour of skin or upon any other visible feature that human being has (e.g. religious attributes, specific behaviour patterns, etc.) does not make for a closer, but rather separates and dissolves, dialogical relation into several monologues which makes impossible any kind productive of interrelation.