This study explores the informal workplace learning of newcomer baristas in New York City’s third wave coffee industry as a political and psychological site where narratives of power, ideology, and agency are continuously negotiated. Drawing on narrative inquiry and correspondence analysis, it examines how psychological constructs such as adaptability, motivation, and belonging function as ideological instruments that both enable and constrain workers’ agency. Narratives from twelve newcomer baristas and twelve café owners across single shops, local chains, and global brands reveal overlapping work values, including customer orientation and hard work, but also newcomer-specific values such as proactive attitude and cultural adaptation.

While café owners frame their enterprises through cosmopolitan and sustainable discourses of “global connection,” they frequently depoliticize the transnational labor sustaining this image. Newcomers’ narratives, by contrast, foreground the emotional and cultural labor of integration, revealing informal learning as a process of navigating systemic inequalities rather than merely acquiring skills. These findings situate informal learning within broader socio-political and postcolonial dynamics, showing how global service industries reproduce neoliberal ideals of self-reliance and cultural “fit,” while also offering spaces of micro-resistance and re-signification.

By theorizing informal workplace learning as a narrative practice shaped by ideology and power, this study contributes to critical theoretical psychology, emphasizing that the making of the “competent worker” is inseparable from the making of the compliant (or resistant) subject in globalized labor economies.

Enforced disappearances constitute an extreme form of state violence that radically disrupts family bonds, mourning processes, and the symbolic conditions of intergenerational transmission (Keilson, 1992; Lira, 2010). In the Chilean context, the persistence of absence and the incompleteness of truth have positioned families, particularly the sons and daughters of disappeared persons, as central actors in the production of memory and in claims for reparation (Jelin, 2002; Piper, 2015). Grounded in critical psychology and Latin American political psychology, this paper draws on the tradition inaugurated by Ignacio Martín-Baró (1998) and aims to analyze how family narratives configure memory practices that operate simultaneously as subjective, relational, and political processes.

Using a qualitative approach ("Groundesd Tehory", Strauss & Corbin, 2002), this study examines in-depth interviews conducted with sons and daughters of victims of enforced disappearance during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990). The findings show that the family emerges as a privileged space for meaning-making, where memory not only preserves the bond with the disappeared person but also articulates demands for truth, justice, and reparation. Intergenerational narratives reveal tensions between silence, memory mandates, and processes of re-signification, giving rise to forms of reparation that exceed institutional frameworks and are embedded in everyday, relational, and symbolic practices (Lira & Weinstein, 2000).

This paper proposes understanding these narratives as psychosocial-political practices that resist the closure of the past and challenge linear conceptions of reparation in contexts of state violence.

The question of what professionalism and professionalisation is has been explored in numerous studies without consenting on what constitutes ‘a good teacher’ (Korthagen 2004, Goodson and Hargreaves 1996). The relationship between profession and person is generally overlooked in the literature on professions, which often become examined in societal perspectives and as collective issues (Hjort and Weber 2004).

Drawing on literature about professionalism (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2012), person-related (McAdams and Pals 2006), narrative (Bruner 1990) and critical cultural (Hundeide 2005, Dreier 2009) psychology, this study explores how teaching professionals and their professional becoming through teacher education and schoolwork may be understood in diverse and more personal ways. The critical/narrative theoretical approach will place professionalisation and personal narratives in contexts, where persons are perceived as participants in social practice structures that construct narratives as meaningful wholes in complex realities.

Analysing and socioculturally comparing (Melhuus 2002) the narratives of two teachers through a realistic and nuanced concept of the person that includes multiple layers and perspectives from an integrative science of personality (McAdams and Pals 2006), make it possible to view teacher professionalism as something that is also borne by the personal, leading to a more precise and thus novel understanding of what teacher professionalism is.

Bruner, J. 1990. Acts of meaning. Harvard University Press.

Dreier, O. 1999. Personal Trajectories of Participation across Contexts of Social Practice. Outlines:5-32.

Hundeide, K. 2005. Socio-Cultural Tracks of Development. Cultural Psychology, 11(2):241-261.

McAdams, D.P. and Pals, J.L. 2006. A New Big Five. American Psychologist, 61(3):204-217.