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A recent special issue of Culture & Psychology focused on dialogic research and the problem of generalizing research from one context to another. A challenge is that the special issue bypassed a crucial discussion of aesthetics, which is a core feature of dialogical research that is important in the discussion about generalization. Using a dialogical approach influenced by Bakhtin, we discuss aesthetics and how it inspires dialogic research. Two features of dialogical research are discussed herein to show where we align with the authors of the special issue: expressed realities (socio-communally constituted realties lived as if given) and ethics. Expressed realities and ethics are foundational for aesthetics and so we seek to add the discussion of aesthetics to the conversation initiated in the special issue. In our efforts to discuss these ideas, we draw upon illustrative examples from interviews about the role of the church in poverty reduction.

Arocha offers a compelling take on the shortfalls associated with the predominant use of inferential statistics in behavioural research. We will show how the author draws upon an idealized view of the mature sciences. Rather than chasing subject-independent reality, we propose that a more fruitful approach to studying behavior lies in considering the reality of sociocommunally constituted human experience. Recognizing the interindividual, symbolic nature of human reality makes way for the discipline to address irreducible human-symbolic ontologies. Further, utilizing multiple symbolic systems enables critique essential for progress in science.

Incoming immigrants to places like Canada tend to be religious and thereby have sympathies counter to prevailing secularizing trends that emerge in research praxis. This paper presents an illustrative case study of Community-Based Research (CBR) that starts from the community to be studied. We illustrate how CBR can be an effective tool for engaging community stakeholders in solving community problems when stakeholders are part of faith-based institutions. This is accomplished by drawing on Ochocka and Janzen (2014) and Janzen et al. (2016), who discuss the hallmarks of CBR that we used to structure a case study with The Salvation Army (TSA). This paper focuses on TSA as a religious institution and how CBR supports TSA’s adjustment to enhance its relationships with a community it finds itself serving: newcomers. We first outline the hallmarks of CBR and show how they are expressed in our case study. Second, we extend Ochocka and Janzen (2014) and Janzen et al. (2016) by focusing on the functions of CBR to illustrate further the outcomes that can emerge from this sort of approach and make recommendations for researching with faith-based institutions.

To better understand the preferred role of faith-based organizations in secular society, the Canadian Council of Churches partnered with researchers to explore current systems of poverty reduction. The nature of the systems involved in attending to the underlying collective subjectivities (i.e., group/communally-shaped psychological experiences such as shared motivations, values, and aspirations) often being overlooked was justification for the importance of the research. These collective subjectivities are the forces that often drive system functioning. We conducted exploratory qualitative work situated in a theoretical frame informed by bringing together systems theory along with cultural psychology (an approach that focuses on socio-communally shaped collective subjectivities). In turn, this theoretical frame-shaped how Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis was employed. A total of 33 participants' collective subjectivities undergirding systems surrounding poverty reduction reveals a missional faith foundation leading toward perceived essential processes of advocacy and congregational connections bridging communal divisions. They see themselves as distinctly striving to create opportunities that encourage poverty alleviation in a holistic and dignified manner reflected in a multidimensional understanding of poverty. Perceived procedural tension exists between giving (that has long-lasting change and resonates with colonial forms of charity) and forming relationships can help people more effectively.

In this engaging and highly readable book, Jungian analyst Michael Gellert takes the reader on a guided tour of God’s “inner journey,” as manifest in the principal texts of the three Abrahamic trad...

In this article, we draw on the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope to make the theoretical argument that the turn to embodiment can be supplemented through a consideration of connotation in d...

An individual-deficit model of diagnosis for mental health asserts that the symptoms of mental illness are the result of personal limitations.1 Such a medical-model defines mental illness in terms ...

Research on priming is commonly taken to establish that much of human behavior is automatic and caused by largely subconscious processes. This research has recently come under increased scrutiny as some classic studies have proved difficult to replicate. In this essay, we bring the views of William James to bear on priming. Though James leaves room for instinct and habit, he rejects the view that human psychology is ultimately mechanistic on the grounds that it is naively simplistic. James is also able to explain why priming studies are bound to face replicability issues: human behavior unfolds in a dynamic multifarious constellation of interrelationships among people, consciousness, and the world. To offer researchers a productive direction for studying cognition, we conclude by briefly introducing an approach known as enactivism – an approach that resonates with the ideas James puts forth.

We review Valery Chirkov’s “Fundamentals of research on culture and psychology: Theory and methods.” The book is written as a textbook, but clearly takes a position that work in culture and psychology should be “problem-oriented, realist, and case-based” (p. 299). It is an innovative piece that covers philosophical paradigms, planning research, and conducting research. Our review outlines main claims made by the book that are likely provocative to mainstream variable-based research and ones that will likely challenge cultural psychologists. Despite the provocations, we argue that the book is an excellent place to start because, as illustrated through the work of Charles Taylor, Chirkov insinuates generative conversations about moral goods. A complimentary discussion through the purview Slavoj Žižec shows how Chirkov promotes awareness of a potential fetish with research methods that are counter productive and unethical.

Cognitive science of religion holds that religious belief emerges via universal pre-given cognitive mechanisms. This position is at odds with cultural psychology, which treats culture and cognition as inseparable, pointing out that phenomena like religious cognition cannot be understood without consideration of the culturally constituted realities people live. We seek to enhance cognitive science of religion with cultural psychology and articulate why change is needed in the former. We predicate our work on Bakhtin’s articulation of the constitutive role of language in religious cognition. A Dynamic Systems approach to cognition enables a cognitive approach that can permit the changes in cognitive science of religion promoted by cultural psychology. This approach leads to a view of cognition that accounts for the phenomena of religious cognition by including language practices of a community.

In 2016, the Main Editors of Dialogic Pedagogy Journal issued a call for papers and contributions to a wide range of dialogic pedagogy scholars and practitioners. One of the scholars who responded to our call is famous American educator Ira Shor, a professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Shor has been influenced by Paulo Freire with whom he published, among other books, “A Pedagogy for Liberation” (1986), the very first “talking book” Freire did with a collaborator. His work in education is about empowering and liberating practice, which is why it has become a central feature of critical pedagogy.Shor’s work has touched on themes that resonate with Dialogic Pedagogy (DP). He emphasises the importance of students becoming empowered by ensuring that their experiences are brought to bear. We were excited when Shor responded to our call for papers with an interesting proposal: an interview that could be published in DPJ, and we enthusiastically accepted his offer. The DPJ Main Editors contacted the DPJ community members and asked them to submit questions for Ira. The result is an exciting in-depth interview with him that revolved around six topics: (1) Social Justice; (2) Dialogism; (3) Democratic Higher Education; (4) Critical Literacy versus Traditional Literacy; (5) Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy; and (6) Language and Thought. Following the interview, we reflect on complimentary themes and tensions that emerge between Shor’s approach to critical pedagogy and DP.

This paper is an introduction to a special issue celebrating the 125 th anniversary of William James' Principles of Psychology. The special issue demonstrates the continued relevance and insight offered by James. It reviews the articles in this issue and delineates three main themes: (1) he recognition of the inherent relationality of psychological phenomena, (2) a science of psychology ought to include biology and sociocultural phenomena (e.g. language); and (3) human consciousness is addressed as the flow of experience from the perspective one living it. It discusses each theme and briefly touches on how they continue to be developed in James' later work, which also provides innovative new directions for psychologists. Undergirding each of these contributions is James' admonition that psychological research is especially difficulty due to the complexity of psychological phenomena. As such, this paper also discusses challenges to doing psychological research that James raises and his ideas that can inform future endeavors.

The present paper is both a critical analysis of the reductive problems inherent in an evolutionary approach that surfaces in the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) and an appeal for an enactive turn that can enhance CSR by better accounting for religious experience – i.e. the phenomenologically experienced realities that are entailed in religious belief. First, we discuss CSR and a basic evolutionary presupposition: that religious experience is based on a universal architecture designed by natural selection, which includes the notion of domain-specific processing mechanisms. We then discuss how Cultural Psychologists conceive of the ontogenetic role of culture by arguing that religious cognition does not solely develop out of evolution. As we propose, CSR can be studied with a view to the evolution of cognition that can account for the ontogenetic role of culture and language constituting phenomenologically immediate realities. Finally, we discuss enactivism as an ideal alternative for such a shift. Enactivism conceives the relation between the evolution of cognition and the ontogenetic role of culture as embodied: a non-reductive relation in which cognition and culture shape each other. This approach allows for CSR that acknowledges the fact that religious experiences constitute non-representational but lived experiences.

Larrain and Haye propose that inner speech is a socially constituted phenomenon. I suggest they provide new directions for understanding inner speech but do not take the reader much beyond discursive psychology. In particular, the authors partially fall into the neglect of embodied experience (i.e., phenomenologically immediate experience) that is already a pitfall of discursive approaches. This commentary attempts to extend some of the ideas already embedded in Larrain and Haye’s article. It attempts to add an account of experience that includes lived tensions. Such an extension potentially takes readers beyond the boundaries of discursive psychology by enabling an approach to inner speech that addresses dynamic lived experiences of tension.

In Discourse & Society, there has been discussion of accounting practices involving refugees, racism, and ethnicity. Some of these articles note that discursive psychology’s emphasis on in-situ constructions leads to a situation where it does not allow us to fully grasp social discourses. This article addresses this critique by discussing conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. It then adds to this discussion by proposing that linguistically constituted phenomenological experience – a topic important in reference to refugees, racism, and ethnicity – is also bypassed by discourse analysis. It draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s early work and on how experience is bound to social discourse. By proposing how Bakhtin meshes with Garfinkel and conversation analysis, it is possible to approach experience using techniques put forward by these perspectives. The result is a proposed way to research social discourse and experience, thereby enhancing discursive analysis.

To promote glucose uptake into fat and muscle cells, insulin causes the translocation of GLUT4 glucose transporters from intracellular vesicles to the cell surface. Previous data support a model in which TUG traps GLUT4-containing vesicles and tethers them intracellularly in unstimulated cells and in which insulin mobilizes this pool of vesicles by releasing this tether. Here we show that TUG undergoes site-specific endoproteolytic cleavage, which separates a GLUT4-binding, N-terminal region of TUG from a C-terminal region previously suggested to bind an intracellular anchor. Cleavage is accelerated by insulin stimulation in 3T3-L1 adipocytes and is highly dependent upon adipocyte differentiation. The N-terminal TUG cleavage product has properties of a novel 18-kDa ubiquitin-like modifier, which we call TUGUL. The C-terminal product is observed at the expected size of 42 kDa and also as a 54-kDa form that is released from membranes into the cytosol. In transfected cells, intact TUG links GLUT4 to PIST and also binds Golgin-160 through its C-terminal region. PIST is an effector of TC10α, a GTPase previously shown to transmit an insulin signal required for GLUT4 translocation, and we show using RNAi that TC10α is required for TUG proteolytic processing. Finally, we demonstrate that a cleavage-resistant form of TUG does not support highly insulin-responsive GLUT4 translocation or glucose uptake in 3T3-L1 adipocytes. Together with previous results, these data support a model whereby insulin stimulates TUG cleavage to liberate GLUT4 storage vesicles from the Golgi matrix, which promotes GLUT4 translocation to the cell surface and enhances glucose uptake.

Postmodern critique has found its way into the psychology of self largely by way of Gergen’s form of social constructionism. This view treats self as socially constructed and changeable, such that a notion like faithfulness to oneself, which is generally thought to belong in the domain of a true core self, is rendered futile. However, Mikhail Bakhtin offers a view of embodied and lived self that expands social constructionist work. It offers a way to think about faithfulness to oneself while not undermining the importance of sociality. This approach enables us to account for the experiential compellingness – which is currently missing in constructionist theorizing – that is bound up with self. The paper first discusses dialogue to show how Bakhtin inspires an understanding of how community shapes the embodied self in a way that calls for a return to the notion of faithfulness to oneself. Then the notion of authorship is addressed in order to show how he could inspire a way of thinking about self-creation (authoring individual self) and the concomitant struggle experienced in being faithful to one’s self.

James Wertsch has been influential in prompting a cultural turn in developmental psychology. Drawing upon the Russian philologist M. M. Bakhtin, Wertsch advocates a sociocultural approach involving the claim that agents’ development and action are mediated by social systems of signs and symbols. We seek to improve upon Wertsch’s understanding of agency by revisiting Bakhtin and the sociocultural quality of embodied action inherent in the phenomenology addressed in Bakhtin’s early work. In particular, this paper takes issue with the notion of mediation because it implies an approach to language that neglects the phenomenological immediacy of experience that is central to embodied action. This paper uses the early work of Bakhtin as a lens by which an idea that occurs in Bakhtin’s later work – speech genres – can be reinterpreted. Doing so enables us to propose how it is possible to have a sociocultural theory of individual ontogenetic development that includes the phenomenological immediacy of experience.

How can we understand socially constituted selfhood? H. Hermans has addressed this question with the notion of the Dialogical Self that he draws from the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. We focus on Bakhtin’s discussion of realism in relation to how he has been interpreted by Hermans. This notion of realism (which we coined ‘‘expressive realism’’) highlights how sociality is inseparably related to embodied experience, thus making way for a sociocultural psychology that takes into account life as it is experientially lived. We point out how Hermans’ vision of the Dialogical Self neglects such embodied experience. This discussion leads to the claim that Bakhtin sees the self as social insofar as our most primary embodied experience is social, where Hermans anchors the sociality of self in inter-subjective exchange. Accordingly, an extension of the Dialogical Self is offered through discussion of these points.

Insulin regulates glucose uptake and storage in peripheral tissues, and has been shown to act within the hypothalamus to acutely regulate food intake and metabolism. The machinery for transduction of insulin signaling is also present in other brain areas, particularly in the hippocampus, but a physiological role for brain insulin outside the hypothalamus has not been established. Recent studies suggest that insulin may be able to modulate cognitive functions including memory. Here we report that local delivery of insulin to the rat hippocampus enhances spatial memory, in a PI-3-kinase dependent manner, and that intrahippocampal insulin also increases local glycolytic metabolism. Selective blockade of endogenous intrahippocampal insulin signaling impairs memory performance. Further, a rodent model of type 2 diabetes mellitus produced by a high-fat diet impairs basal cognitive function and attenuates both cognitive and metabolic responses to hippocampal insulin administration. Our data demonstrate that insulin is required for optimal hippocampal memory processing. Insulin resistance within the telencephalon may underlie the cognitive deficits commonly reported to accompany type 2 diabetes.