Dialogic Tensions Research Articles

Decolonizing IS through tecnologia social: Fostering epistemic plurality in the design of solidarity cryptocurrency in Latin America

AbstractWesternised paradigms dominate the information systems (IS) field, often overshadowing alternative epistemologies. This study challenges the prevailing hegemonic view and contributes to the decolonization of IS research and practice by proposing a Latin American and decolonial approach to technological development that emphasises community centrality and epistemic justice through recognition of local knowledges and Indigenous traditions. Using design ethnography, we follow the development of a solidarity cryptocurrency in a Brazilian favela. Our paper offers two key contributions. By introducing tecnologia social, an underrepresented perspective in IS, we highlight ecology of knowledges, centrality of the local and decolonial reconfiguration as principles that can enrich the understanding of IS projects from a decolonial perspective. In addition, we propose a new concept—epistemic dialogical tension—as a process wherein different epistemologies coexist and accommodate each other, encouraging a dynamic interplay of distinct human experiences and worldviews. It offers new paths to IS scholars and practitioners in navigating the complexities of epistemic plurality. We argue that tecnologia social and epistemic dialogical tension provide fertile ground for developing reimagined, decolonized approaches where multiple epistemologies can coexist, favouring the often‐silenced communities they are intended to benefit.

"Talking About Funerals Won't Make You Dead": Dialogic Tensions in Death Café Design and Facilitation.

Death Cafes (DCs) explicitly encourage conversation and constitute space to explore the dialogue around death and dying. This study draws on scholarship from communication and dialogue theory to explore the design features and facilitation practices used within DC meetings. Through qualitative analysis of the DC webpage and interviews with facilitators, the study uncovers how DC facilitators structure and manage conversations to help attendees normalize death conversations and manage the death anxiety of others in their lives. The analysis highlights three main tensions within the DC structure and facilitation guidelines: structure versus openness, authority versus equality, and conversation versus information. These fundamental contradictions are inherent in DCs, and facilitators need to manage them in order to promote meaningful dialogue among DC participants. This study deepens the theorizing around DC facilitation practices and has implications for death and dying practitioners hoping to foster dialogue about end-of-life topics.

Navigating the Dialogic Tensions and Self-Contradictions as a Bilingual Researcher

This autoethnography delineates how, I, as a bilingual researcher proficient in Korean and English, negotiated the tensions between conforming to English-only academic writing norms for survival in academia and embracing translingual writing practices during the composition of my dissertation. Based on the salient themes and repeating experiences that I penned in analytic memos, field notes and diaries, I meticulously rearranged the thoughts and emotions, weaving them into stream-of-consciousness-style narratives. Through this method, I aimed to vividly portray the inevitable tensions that might be experienced by numerous bilingual researchers speaking English as a second language. This autoethnography particularly portrays the troubles of conveying intricate cultural nuances when translating my research partners’ Korean responses into English. Also, I detail the process of how I negotiated the dilemmas between artistic translingual writing and writing solely in English for a broader readership. Such detailing processes eventually prompted me to contemplate whether I truly embodied the transformative linguistic practices that I kept advocating for in my research projects. This autoethnography, although entailing vulnerability, ultimately underscores the significance of practicing self-reflexivity through crafting authentic and vivid narratives.

Challenges and Concerns in Assisting Indigenous People with Suicide Attempts.

There has been an alarming rise in suicide attempts among Indigenous people in Brazil, leading to national concerns about the provision of psychosocial care and professional support. In this study, we make an attempt to understand the perspectives of professionals in assisting Indigenous people from a specific group, the Inỹ, and identify the specific challenges of addressing issues through the mental health care system related specifically to suicide prevention. Using a qualitative approach with participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the research included Indigenous and their families assisted by three public institutions and the professionals that work in public psychosocial assistance. For this paper, we examined the tensions, conflicts, and challenges of the healthcare professionals at one of these institutions, a Psychosocial Care Center in the state of Goiás/Brazil. For data analysis, a sociocultural protocol was built to identify dialogical tensions between the different thematic fields of mental health care. The findings reveal that the theme of suicide was an important concern in the daily work with the community. Still, there were significant issues related to the assumptions, methodology, and meaning of care between the professionals and the community, on account of which the objective of the programme to address suicide attempts had not been effective or successful. The discussion of the results raises several critical questions about the possible contributions of dialogical cultural psychology in the context of Indigenous health. Also, it has important implications for the global issue of the wellbeing of Indigenous people.

Regulating liminality: Making sense of the vegetative state and defining the limits of end-of-life action.

Persistently alive but unaware, vegetative state patients are stuck in the transition between life and death - that is, in a liminal hotspot. This condition raises complex ethical and legal dilemmas concerning end-of-life action. Drawing on social representations (SRs) and the liminality framework, our research investigated how the vegetative state was constructed within the Italian parliamentary debates discussing end-of-life bills (2009-2017). We aimed to understand (1) how political groups represented the vegetative state, (2) how they legitimised different end-of-life bills and (3) came to terms with the issue of liminal hotspots. By dialogically analysing three debates (No. of interventions = 98), we identified six themes and discursive aims allowing parliamentarians to differently represent the vegetative state and support different courses of action. In turn, we identified new features of the psycho-social processes generating SRs: the dialogical tensions between anchoring and de-anchoring. Results corroborated the idea that de-paradoxifying liminality relies on group sense-making and, thus, different political leanings differently addressed the liminality of the vegetative state. We also reveal a novel feature of dealing with liminal hotspots informing the psycho-social literature that applies when a decision needs to be taken, such as in the case of crafting a law: moving from the paradox.

Projecting and Infrastructuring: Designing Cryptocurrencies for the Solidarity Economy

Solidarity cryptocurrency is a recent phenomenon that connects the social perspective of community currencies with the technological architecture of the cryptocurrencies. By dealing with logics coming from different universes, the social perspective of community currencies with the technological architecture of the cryptocurrencies, designing a solidarity cryptocurrency is about making possible the connection between these two distinct worlds. To investigate the designing of solidarity cryptocurrency, this paper develops an alternative view of the cryptocurrency design that emerges from a Solidarity Economy experience, showing how the process of designing a solidarity cryptocurrency holds a dialogic tension between two ways of design. Our conceptual background integrated elements of two theoretical traditions. First, the tecnologia social, a Latin American concept that sees the development of technologies for social transformation built and/or appropriated by the population affected by them. Second, the concept of infrastructuring, which denotes a multi-relational and processual perspective of information infrastructures design. We adopt a design ethnography strategy to examine the design of a solidarity cryptocurrency, an infrastructure that adapts the digital payment platform held by the solidarity organization Instituto E-Dinheiro Brasil into a blockchain platform. Our study reveals the importance of connecting local resources and knowledge through developing located accountability by experts, direct community participation, and integrating local technologies. We unveil how process of reconfiguration of artefacts, imaginaries and social practices unfold towards a solidary economy landscape.

Native American Women as Palimpsestic Apparitions in Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s The Revenant

Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s mythic retelling of the Hugh Glass story revises and critiques the grand narratives of American exceptionalism born of the frontier. It highlights the violence bred of racism that weaves throughout the history of westward expansion, undercuts the genre’s tendency toward white privilege through multi-lingual narratives, and centers a counter-narrative focused on Indigenous families and women. Building from and reflecting on my earlier work in Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film, this essay reads the film’s representation of Native/First Nations women as palimpsestic apparitions of the Celluloid Indian Maiden trope that are both progressive and problematic in their ability to counter white hegemonic narratives of power and ongoing racism. This reading engages the dialogical tension between Iñárritu’s representation of his two primary Indigenous women—the “ghost” of Glass’ wife and Powaqa—allowing us to explore the hegemonic power of cinematic tropes in residual form. Ultimately, as Indigenous responses are brought to bear witness, we are asked to consider our ongoing attachment to particular tropes and depictions of Indigenous women even as we attempt to critique them.

The Dialogical Configuration in Petra Regalada, by Antonio Gala

The Spanish drama text Petra regalada, by Antonio Gala is addressed here. The main objective is to explain how a dialogic tension is configured by appealing to common law to affirm the discursive values of a social group through discursive mechanisms that make possible the liberation of the consciences of the subjects represented there. To support this analysis, we start with the concept of literature as an ideological sign through the notions of dialogism and third interpreter, developed in the works of Mijaíl Bakhtin, as well as the theory of paratexts by Gerard Genette.

Traces of Homer in Ishmael’s Double Vision

Among the many complex stylistic features that contribute to the enduring appeal of Moby-Dick is Ishmael’s tendency to effect sudden, often perplexing shifts in attitude and tone of voice, particularly when describing activities associated with whaling. In recent years, Melville scholars have enriched our understanding of this narrative instability by applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts, particularly his dialogical views of language, consciousness, and the novel. This essay argues along similar lines, and examines salient instances of tonal and rhetorical disjuncture in Ishmael’s narrative in light of their dialogical implications. However, the author also posits that some of Ishmael’s tonal anomalies strongly echo the discrepant and ambivalent narrative tone that can be found in Homer’s Iliad. The similarities in tonal discord are made all the more conspicuous by Ishmael’s prominent adoption of literary devices that are closely associated with the epic, such as hypallage and the Homeric simile. One potent effect of this dual-voiced echoing of Homeric narration is to illustrate the seductive resilience of heroic-epic attitudes towards martial glory and honor, which endure in the cultural consciousness, albeit in a state of dialogic tension with voices that value principles of peace, brotherhood, and compassion.

Navigating and Negotiating Health and Social Services in the Context of Homelessness: Resistance and Resilience

In this article, we draw upon a case study exploring social inequality and homelessness in homeless-oriented services in a large health and social services centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We take up professionals’ (working in homelessness services) and service users’ (people experiencing homelessness) (N=12) perspectives exploring slippery notions of empowerment/disempowerment using a stigma, resistance, and resilience lens. We mobilize the concepts of navigation and negotiation to better understand participants’ experiences of stigma and the dialogical tensions in empowerment/disempowerment constructs moving beyond simple worker/service user dichotomies of powerful/powerlessness. We explore the more nuanced ways professionals and people who experience homelessness (often described in passive terms) understand these tensions and the dynamics at play within professional relationships, systems, and structural constraints. We unpack professionals’ “silent practices” in their effort to “empower” service users and resist institutional forged by neoliberal pressures. We make the case that systemic and structural constraints manifested in institutional practices push people experiencing homelessness to adopt strategies of resilience.

Disentangling Antifeminist Paradoxes: Alternative Organizing in Antifeminist Online Spaces

In this study, we revisit alternative feminist organizing in order to identify the dialectical tensions, paradoxical discourses, and agentic qualities of women’s participation in an online antifeminist space. We engage in text mining, semantic network analysis, and the constant comparative method to identify dialogical tensions and the paradoxical organizing strategies of Red Pill Women, an online community on the social networking platform, Reddit. Through analyzing Red Pill Women as an antifeminist space constituted through postfeminist logics, we identify three paradoxical tensions, begin to disentangle postfeminism from antifeminism, and build on alternative organizing theory with recent work on hidden and invisible organizations to further theorize gendered (in)visibility and (anti)feminist organizing practices.

Movement–Media Relations in the Hybrid Media System: A Case Study from the U.S. Transgender Rights Movement

Whereas social movement–media relations were, in the era of mass media, a dialogic relationship of mutual, albeit asymmetric, dependency between news makers and social movement organizations, the hybridization of the media system has complicated matters considerably. The dialogic tensions that drove organizations’ access to the political information environment have been supplanted by new tensions—tensions that have transformed organizations’ media work routines. Organizations must now manage tensions over the temporality of issue emergence, tensions between identity and policy knowledge as sources of expertise, tensions between emotional charge and informational novelty as criteria of newsworthiness for journalists, and tensions between policy demands and media demands in the formation of communications strategy. And these new tensions demand new work practices oriented toward addressing multiple audiences concurrently and via multiple media streams. Because the discourses of social media influence the press to such an extent, the successful management of press discourse requires both direct influence via routine media work targeting journalists and indirect influence via steering digital media discourse—the combination of which presents significant resource costs to movement organizations. This article draws on an ethnographic case study of media work in the U.S. transgender rights movement to extend theorizations of movement–media relations to account for the structuring influence of the hybrid media system, illustrating these news tensions in the context of the panic over transgender passport policy that erupted in the summer of 2018.

Embodied Masculine Sovereignty, Reimagined Femininity: Implications of a Soyinkaesque Reading of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther

In more ways than critics have mentioned, Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed Black Panther (2018) holds a vibrant conversation with Wole Soyinka’s mythopoetic orientation. But apart from Ryan Coogler’s ventriloquist reference to “The Fourth Stage,” Black Panther confers with Soyinka in many other interesting ways. In this article, I explore the mythic patterns in the movie by reading it alongside Soyinka’s densely mythic essay, “The Fourth Stage,” in order to pry the movie open for analysis. I posit that reading Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther side-by-side Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage” amplifies the dialogic tension between violence and justice in both works, on the one hand, and exposes the strategies by which female subjectivity is reimagined in Black Panther’s radical universe, on the other hand. I also note that, in particular, Black Panther emerges from the comparative reading as somewhat inadvertently attempting a redefinition of tragedy.

Economic autarkeia

The concept of autarkeia present in the Aristotelian Politics is conceived as inseparable from the end of the city-State, insofar as it is not only constituted for mere living (zen) but for living well (eu zen). This implies a moralization of the state order that allows us to think about the conformation of an economic dimension based on the concept of autarkeia. Taking as a methodological starting point the “dialogical tension zones” device (Mársico, 2010), we will affirm that exists an Aristotelian economic thinking based on three significant concepts of his political philosophy: “self-sufficiency”, “city-State”, “justice” (Polanyi, 1994). Finally, we will affirm that the concept of “natural slavery” aims to guarantee the constitution of an autonomous productive economic order that delegitimizes the federated states’ model of organization (summachia).

Dialogic Tensions in Pre-Service Subject Teachers’ Identity Negotiations

ABSTRACT This study explores how five pre-service subject teachers from different disciplines made sense of and characterized their teacher identity after completing their yearlong pedagogical studies. Leaning on the Bakhtinian dialogical approach and socio-culturally oriented discourse analysis, we examine how the students negotiated multiple voices in their narratives (interviews) and how they positioned themselves in relation to these voices. In the students’ identity negotiation, the Discourse based on participatory pedagogy and education responsibility contradicted with the Discourse of traditional pedagogy that the students had as a cultural resource from their own youth. These different Discourses collided with each other and were tested and reflected in an internal dialogue. Through this process, the students negotiated their prospective subject teacher identity.

Talking about cultural diversity at school: dialogical tensions and obstacles to secondarisation

In Switzerland, as elsewhere, issues dealing with cultural diversity raise major challenges in education. At present, little is known about how students make sense of these highly sensitive societal issues and relate them to their everyday experience. Drawing on a sociocultural and dialogical approach to learning, this study aimed at understanding how the students made sense of themes related to cultural diversity. More generally, it sought to examine whether secondarisation (i.e. a transformation of everyday experience into a more generic and scientific form) took place. In this study, ten focus groups were carried out: five in primary school (11- to 12-year-old students) and five in lower secondary school (13- to 14-year-old students) in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The specificity of the research design consisted of setting up a situation that had both similarities and differences with lessons on cultural diversity that had previously been taught in the classroom. We assumed that this would create dialogical tensions and thereby shed light on the obstacles that may arise when themes related to cultural diversity are taught in school. Analysis of the discursive dynamics of the focus-group discussions showed that education for cultural diversity cannot be considered independently of the student’s other spheres of experiences. Personal, social and moral dimensions are part of the students’ effort to make sense of the themes under discussion. Talking about cultural diversity, even though with pleasure and involvement, cannot be equated with learning and transforming these themes into scientific concepts. Moreover, dialogical tensions can create unexpected effects and even bring about the very phenomena that education for cultural diversity is supposed to fight.

Recall of the Fairy-Tale Wolf: “Little Red Riding Hood” in the Dialogic Tension of Contemporary Wolf Politics in the US West

Recall of the Fairy-Tale Wolf: “Little Red Riding Hood” in the Dialogic Tension of Contemporary Wolf Politics in the US West

Dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy: Social science research in the era of positivism and post-truth

The goal of this article is to compare and contrast dialogic analysis versus discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy to address Bakhtin’s quest for “human sciences” and avoid modern traps by positivism and by post-truth. We argue that dialogic analysis belongs to dialogic science, which focuses on studying “the surplus of humanness” (Bakhtin, 1991, p. 37). “The surplus of humanness” is “a leftover” from the biologically, socially, culturally, and psychologically given – the typical and general – in the human nature. It is about the human authorship of the ever-unique meaning-making. Dialogic analysis involves the heart and mind of the researchers who try to reveal and deepen the meanings of the studied phenomena by addressing and replying to diverse research participants, other scholars, and anticipated readers (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, & Gradovski, 2019, in press). We argue that dialogic science is concerned with meta-inquiries such as, “What does something in question mean to diverse people, including the researchers, and why? How do diverse people address and reply to diverse meanings?” In contrast, traditional, positivistic, science is concerned with meta-inquiries such as, “How things really are? What is evidence for that? How to eliminate any researchers’ subjectivity from the research?” (Matusov, 2019, submitted). Positivist (and monologic) science focuses on revealing patterns of actions, behaviors, and relationships. We argue that in the study of dialogic pedagogy, it is structural and/or functional discourse analysis that focuses on studying the given and objective aspects of dialogic pedagogy. In the paper, we consider, describe, interpret, and dialogically re-analyze a case of dialogic analysis involving science education coming from David Hammer’s and Emily van Zee’s (2006) book. We also discuss structural and functional discourse analysis of two pedagogical cases, a monologic and a dialogic one, provided by David Skidmore (2000). We dialogically re-analyze these two cases and Skidmore’s research. We conclude that in research on dialogic pedagogy (and beyond, on social sciences in general) both dialogic science (involving dialogic analysis) and positivist science (involving discourse analysis) are unavoidable and needed, while providing the overall different foci of the research. We discuss the appropriateness and the limitations of discourse analysis as predominantly searching for structural-functional patterns in the classroom discourses. We discuss dialogic tensions in the reported dialogues that cannot be captured by discourse analysis search for patterns. Finally, we discuss two emerging issues among ourselves: 1) whether discourse analysis is always positivist and 2) how these two analytic approaches complement each other while doing research on dialogic pedagogy (and beyond).

Hardy’s Laodiceanism: Dare’s Role in A Laodicean

Laodiceanism is the blueprint from which Hardy draws one of his most ingenuous effects: the creating of a Laodicean around which the novel constructs its ambiguity. Hardy’s command of “ingenuity” joins both the leading heroine Paula and the minor character Dare into the same catego ry of a Laodicean. Alongside Paula, Dare is the most important ingredient in the novel in that he acts as an enigmatic persona defying the reader’s attempts to establish a coherent type. This paper aims to offer a close reading of Dare’s life story, which is chosen for discussion as he has been deemed as a simple functionary and thus apparently escaped serious criti cal notice thus far. It is stressed that the structure of sensations Dare embodies is fascinating in the sense that it is a locus where the coexis tence of both meaning and nonmeaning would not amount to harmonious peace or stability so much as permits the impossibility of single and cen tral significance. In this coexistence is inscribed a notion that the binaries in opposition are endlessly inter-mingled in dialogic tension, which is the hallmark of Laodiceanism that Hardy aims to present through the creation of Dare.

“Teen Views of Sex:” Inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story produced by Mexican immigrant youth

This paper proposes an analysis of dialogical processes in the creation of a radio feature story titled “Teen Views of Sex,” co-produced by Mexican immigrant high school students in the context of a Youth Radio and Radio Arts program. After describing the socio-cultural and curricular context of the program, I apply Zittoun and Grossen’s (2013) semiotic approach to dialogicality to describe the kinds of dialogue that took place during the interviews and subsequent reflections upon the feature story and production process. The types of dialogue examined include: actual dialogue, distant dialogue, auto-dialogue, dialogue between situations, and dialogue with material objects, or non-human actants. I explore how the inter-animation of these forms of dialogue gave rise to dialogic tensions, which may have created openings for shifts in identity positioning and an enhanced sense of agency for the youth in their personal and public lives.