In recent years, we have witnessed a growing polarization of political and ideological positions in public debate. The debate has moved from face-to-face forums to the digital environment. From a historical-cultural perspective (Wersch, 1998), we understand that the mediating tools used in social communication in this context, such as social networks and various digital media, with their characteristics, limitations, and possibilities, could be conditioning expression and, therefore, the internalization of discourses and affective-symbolic logics that tend toward extremism and the radicalization of messages (Marantz, 2020).

On the other hand, those of us who participate in these scenarios maintain a perception of freedom. We consider ourselves radically autonomous, while unknowingly cooperating with our own domination or surveillance. Hypnocracy (Xun, 2025) is based precisely on this paradox: the more intensely we experience the feeling of choice, the more deeply rooted the criteria by which we are classified, evaluated, and/or normalized become. Predictive algorithms, security protocols, and risk management systems do not need to prohibit; it is enough to filter, order, and hierarchize our possibilities for action and present them as agency-driven and spontaneous options, as proposed by Foucault's (2007) notion of biopolitics and governmentality, because we believe that we are witnessing a new phase: it is no longer just a matter of managing populations, but of governing from within the subject's own self-relation, that is, the way in which they think of themselves as free agents.

In this context, radical discourses, such as anti-feminist and anti-immigration discourses (Elis & Bhatia), and even those that imply a subhumanization of “others” (immigrants, minorities, women, etc.) (Teo, 2020), are consumed and recreated in monochromatic digital environments that reinforce confirmation biases and, therefore, the polarization of citizens' attitudes.

This dark political and social landscape has led us to inquire, within the framework of projects in which different scenarios of activity and social groups interact, those conditions that could build bridges between subjectivities that would otherwise remain isolated and, at present, opposed. From our practice in emancipatory projects in disadvantaged communities in contexts of cultural diversity, in which we have participated for 30 years, we have observed the emergence of hybrid scenarios of activity and hybrid psychological agents, which we will present as transformative possibilities (Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2020; 2021; Macías-Gómez-Estern et al., 2025).

These scenarios and agents have emerged throughout the process of face-to-face participation in activities with low levels of formalization, often mediated by artistic languages (e.g., music), and have generated systems that are resilient to crises and emancipatory transformations in the different groups and individuals participating (Martínez-Lozano et al; 2023; Lalueza et. al, 2024; Macías-Gómez-Estern & Lalueza, 2024). In this presentation, we will share our ongoing reflections on these ideas.

Our contribution is therefore situated at the intersection of political philosophy and critical psychology, and questions those other possible figures of the subject that can operate as counter-devices against the new regimes of power.

References:

Ellis, B. D., & Bhatia, S. (2019). Cultural psychology for a new era of citizenship politics. Culture & Psychology, 25(2), 220-240.

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978.

Lalueza, J.L.; Martínez-Lozano, V. & Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2024). University-community partnerships as “hybrid contexts of activity”: learnings from two projects with Roma children in Spain. En M.W. Mahmood, M. Faulstich Orellana & J. Cano (eds). University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal, pp. 265-282. Springer Nature.

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2020). "Hybrid psychology agent": Overcoming the about/for dichotomy from praxis, Theory & Psychology, 30 (3), 430-435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354320923726

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2021). Critical Psychology for community emancipation: insights from socio-educative praxis in hybrid setting. In Machin, R. (Ed.) The new waves in Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Empirical and theoretical tendencies and Challenges. Palgrave-McMillan (pp.25-54).

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. & Lalueza, J.L. (2024). Navigating I-positionings in higher education Service Learning as hybrid scenarios: a case study, Language, Culture and Social Interaction, 45, 100805.

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B., Martínez-Lozano, V., & Lalueza, J.L (2025). Re-envisioning collaborative university-community engagement through a critical ethnographic lens: transformative hybrid scenarios. Ethnography and Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2025.2565009

Marantz, A. (2020). Antisocial: Online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. Penguin.

Seco-Martinez, J.M. (2025) La democracia Despierta. Frente al capitalismo de vigilancia. Aconcagua

Teo, T. (2020). Subhumanism: The re‐emergence of an affective‐symbolic ontology in the migration debate and beyond. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(2), 132-148.

Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Harvard University Press.

Xun, J. (2025). Ipnocrazia. Trump, Muske l’architettura della realtà. Edizioni Tlon.

This presentation traces the theoretical and methodological evolution of my research into collective remembering and UK-Japan reconciliation practices from a discursive psychological perspective. Beginning with a social constructionist foundation, my work has progressively engaged with sociocultural theory, positioning theory and actor-network theory to explore how memory is not passively stored but actively constructed through discourse, interaction and material and embodied practices. I examine how reconciliation processes unfold in post-Second World War contexts, where historical narratives are dialogically negotiated, contested and reimagined. Central to this inquiry is the argumentative nature of remembering—how individuals and groups justify, challenge and reframe the past in ways that shape both personal and collective identities. The research foregrounds the performative and embodied dimensions of memory, attending to how voice, affect, material artefacts and spatial arrangements participate in the co-construction of meaning. By situating memory and reconciliation within everyday talk and institutional narratives, the work highlights the entanglement of discourse with materiality and agency. The presentation offers a reflexive account of key theoretical tensions and methodological shifts encountered along this journey, including the challenges and affordances of interdisciplinary integration. Ultimately, it argues for a more nuanced, dynamic understanding of memory and reconciliation as situated, contested, embodied and materially mediated practices. This approach not only enriches discursive psychological inquiry but also contributes to broader debates on how societies remember, reconfigure and reimagine their pasts.

The phenomenon I research is language, my question is how language works in human life. This ‘working’ occurs interpersonally, intrapersonally, and transpersonally, transcending the local interactions between co-present people. This approach does not privilege the psychological, i.e. individual mind, reaching out for language in a second step; nor does it privilege the linguistic apart from its psychological volume. With the working of language, the theory I suggest is pragmatic and dialogic: performed symbols we move through together, dia-logos. And we are moved through, are subjected to: Living language is doing it actively and it is being lived by it in interaction and thinking, with others and without them; it passes through us across time and situations, building up that ever changing and still recognizable ‘dialogical texture’ woven in polyphony and heterology. Thus my ‘reading direction’ for language is the common social, cultural, historical reality. Language activity cannot be but a plural dynamic of call-and-response, it is formed and accessible to the senses: it is simultaneously a sensorial and a symbolic phenomenon. Aiming at a holistic picture of language activity, I look at the rhetorical field with interlocutors, an audience, a speech community, an enacted-created semiotic field, bodies moving, postures and positionings, voices and gazes – and this field is saturated with imaginary instances that can be called in. Observable is how a series of political-epistemological decisions made this field shrink: language is evacuated from the mind, from moving bodies; others with their listening and questions and the field we stand in located and positioned are non-existent. It is from there that I will argue for living language as a political activity.

In this presentation, I argue for the idea that the unitary view of language, such as the atomistic view held by Locke’s philosophy, has prevented cultural psychology scholars to accept and develop further the idea of mind as language. The thing is that language is not unitary but plural and diverse. Language is not an abstract structure or a transparent medium of communicating minds, but rather a dialogical, historical, and performative process of social encounter, organized through specific and concrete forms, linguistic forms. We do many different things when we speak, and we do many of these different things in the same stream of consciousness. Bakhtin refers to these different social activities that involve typical forms of utterances as speech genres, and each speech genre has its own purpose, audience, interlocutors, compositional style, etc. Speech genres have a political dimension, because they suppose and assume specific speakers and power relationships, and in doing so, they perform power. The interest thread is that there are speech genres for public expression but also for private expression. And here is the core of my argument: different inner speech genres, involving different ways of using language, form and perform different psychological activities. The main argument of the talk is that the mind is formed and performed by the concrete and situated materiality of inner speech genres. Moreover, the mind unfolds as inner genres. In doing so, the political unfolding of the mind is performed through its generic dimension.