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.

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.

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.