The processes linking meaning, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity constitute a central challenge for understanding life trajectories marked by dark times, particularly experiences of entrapment or violence during childhood. This presentation explores the conditions of possibility of speech, as well as the processes of elaboration unfolding within the temporal dynamics of subjectivation and relational life.

Cultural psychology, in the tradition of Vygotsky and subsequent developments, addresses the effects of constraining environments on human development. Following Bakhtin, a path-breaking figure in the vibrant dialogical current, dialogical psychology is grounded in a conception of mind as fundamentally relational. In this presentation, this framework is mobilized to examine dialogical processes and meaning-making, as well as their disruptions under conditions of violence and entrapment, through a fine-grained analysis of discourse, its polyphonies, self-positions, and dynamics of sense.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and violence, this communication conceptualizes entrapment not as a form of power but as a radical rupture of the dialogical bond, and adopts a psychodynamic perspective attentive to the singularity of the subject.

This analysis is supported by an in-depth case study embedded within broader research devoted to desire, based on a corpus of more than 250 authentic therapeutic interviews in clinical sexology.

Among other findings, the analyses demonstrate that subtle discursive variations accompany shifts in self-positions and intersubjective dynamics. These findings open toward a renewed understanding of elaborative processes in traumatic contexts, where dominant clinical frameworks tend to posit a relative fixation or rigidity of psychic organization.

Unified libertarian theory (ULT) contends that libertarianism and realism are expressions of a single ethic shaped by context. At its core, ULT affirms the nonaggression principle (NAP) as the foundational moral commitment of libertarian thought. However, it recognizes that international relations lack the legal infrastructure and mutual norms that make this principle operational at home. While a domestic environment allows for law and norms-based restraint, foreign affairs operate in an anarchic environment where deterrence, not morality, secures order. ULT asserts that liberty is preserved through two means: institutions where possible, strategy where necessary. Realism becomes not a rival to libertarianism but its external application in a world without courts, contracts, or reciprocity. Power must still be bound, but by prudence and self-interest rather than statute. The state’s function remains constant: to preserve liberty, not project virtue. Internally, this is achieved through decentralized law and voluntary interaction; externally, through strategic discipline and calibrated force. ULT acknowledges that a state may be forced to act to preserve the liberty of those it serves. Action must be guided by interest, necessity, and proportionality. Coercion is justified only insofar as it defends liberty without becoming its own threat. ULT therefore rejects both the moral imperialism of idealist interventionism and the paralyzed absolutism of doctrinaire pacifism. ULT offers a doctrine for a world where good intentions are not enough. It affirms that liberty is sustained by structure—legal where it can be, strategic where it must. Additionally, ULT can be used to gain greater insight into how states think as unitary actors, relying on public choice theory, realism, and classical liberal thinkers to lay the foundation. Using ULT as a lens can provide insight into causes and outcomes of armed interstate conflicts, alliances, and treaties, while providing greater clarity on interstate and international relations in general.

This theoretical synthesis explores the notion of home as a dynamic, semiotically mediated construct by connecting a dimensional model of home with a case study on international students’ lived negotiations of belonging. The model conceptualizes home as a hypergeneralized feeling field that becomes experientially meaningful through semiotic emergence across temporal, psychosocial, spatial, cultural, and power dimensions. The power dimension, in particular, highlights how social hierarchies, institutional structures, and political conditions shape who is permitted to feel at home and under what circumstances. The case study illustrates how these interwoven dimensions unfold in practice, showing that home is not a fixed location but a dialogical and developmental process continually reshaped through rupture, transition, and imaginative reconstruction. Drawing on dialogical and developmental perspectives, it demonstrates how internal and external voices, cultural symbols, and imagined futures interweave to restore coherence and continuity after migration-induced disruptions.

By linking the theoretical hierarchy of affective-semiotic levels with the empirical narrative of symbolic reattachment, this synthesis reveals how meaning-making, emotion, and imagination together constitute home as both a psychological resource and an evolving identity field. Home thus emerges as a site of agency and negotiation within asymmetrical power relations, where individuals construct belonging through semiotic traces—food, language, memory, and cultural icons—that bridge past and present. The integration of these perspectives underscores the developmental and dialogical complexity of “home” as a lived process and invites further theoretical discussion on how semiotic mediation, identity, and power co-produce a sense of being at home.

In dark times, when the conditions for belonging weaken and the bonds that hold communities together begin to fray, our theories of mind and culture cannot remain neutral. They must help us understand how human worlds are sustained, how they collapse, and how the subtle drift from membership into abuse becomes possible. Enactivism, particularly in its culturally attuned form, offers conceptual tools for illuminating these dynamics. Drawing on Humberto Maturana’s account of languaging, affect, and the relational grounding of human life, this presentation revisits enactive cultural psychology not simply as an explanatory framework but as a way of theorizing the vulnerabilities of social existence under conditions of strain.

Maturana’s work begins with a simple but unsettling insight: human beings do not live in a world of information, but in a world constituted through recursive, consensual coordination. Language does not transmit knowledge; it generates the conversational networks within which relational possibilities emerge. The quality of those relations determines whether we flourish in membership or become entangled in abusive, domination-based patterns that erode our humanity. With this in mind, I develop three interrelated claims.

1. Language Does Not Convey Understanding.

Maturana rejects the idea that language functions as a conduit for knowledge, truth, or skill. Instead, language structures the relational space in which learning may occur through lived experience. In dark times, when political and social crises are often framed as failures of information, this perspective invites us to look instead at the breakdown of relational domains: what falters is not the transfer of knowledge but the conditions for trust, mutual orientation, and social membership.

2. Experience Is Expressed, and Expression Is Inherently Risky.

Experience becomes available only through expression; there is no inner realm to which one has privileged access. Yet, expression is never safe. It exposes one to misunderstanding, dismissal, or punitive response—particularly in social environments shaped by fear, ressentiment, or ideological polarization. Maturana’s distinction between membership and abuse becomes especially salient here: in abusive relational domains, expressive acts are met not with coordination but with negation. Thus, self-understanding itself becomes precarious, sustained only to the extent that others respond in ways that allow expression to remain a viable practice.

3. Normativity Is Irreducible and Under Strain.

All cultural expression is normative, and our participation in cultural life depends on developing normative skills that orient us within shared practices. When the norms inherent in our practices erode or fragment, the consensual basis of our human world loosens. What Vygotsky called “higher mental functions” can be reinterpreted as the normative competencies that allow for responsible, humane coexistence—a fragile achievement that dark times place under increasing pressure.

By reframing enactive cultural psychology through Maturana’s lens, this presentation argues that theorizing in dark times requires attending not to information or cognition in isolation but to the conversational ecologies that sustain human worlds, and to the risks, failures, and possibilities embedded in our ongoing attempts to live together.