No abstract

The aim of this article is to motivate and outline a dialogical perspective on agency that accommodates centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in current cultural theories of agency. To complement approaches that assume a high degree of integration and clarity, we emphasise the diversity of agency as it is experienced in the open‐ended dialogical relationship with a particular other. While these former approaches to agency provide us with the means to examine the influence of social processes such as division of labour and reproduction of community, they tend to underplay the importance of agency as it is embodied and experienced in the lives of particular people. To reflect on this aspect of agency, we will draw extensively on Bakhtin's work, which crosses boundaries between philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, and which is concerned to understand what is personal in activity. In terms of agency, his work draws our attention to the sense of responsibility and potentiality that imbues our dialogues with particular others, the aesthetics and ethics involved in dialoguing with the other, and the sense of dilemmatic choice and intonation that is involved in our dialogue with the other.

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Consultation is an important feature of research and, increasingly, researchers are required to work in partnership with stakeholders to increase the impact of their work. Our aim is to demonstrate what can be learned from the scholarship on, and practice of, member checking to facilitate productive knowledge exchange. Using dialogical analysis we explore three member check interactions from three different qualitative psychology projects focusing our analysis on difficult moments between researchers and participants conceptualised here as 'sore spots'. We identify two major genres in these sequences: participant ambivalence and participant challenge.We then consider passages that allow us to explore a more theoretical understanding of these two genres in terms of the metaphor of portraits and mirrors. Overall, we outline how implicit epistemologies and theories of subjectivity (uncomplicated, blank, and complex) may be linked to the way in which stakeholders approach research. We also provide a map with regard to the theories within which member checks can be undertaken, associated research practices in terms of a range of researcher responses to stakeholder ambivalence and challenge, and implications of these moments for knowledge exchange for qualitative research but also for psychological science as a whole. We conclude that sore spots in knowledge exchange process can be productive opportunities of transformational validity.

In this article, the authors consider the potential contribution of the concept "lived experience" to the psychology of art. From the perspective of "lived experience," the self is always already engaged and comes to every situation with personal interests and ideologies, and the art object is, among other things, understood as "speaking to" or addressing interests and ideologies. This view situates art objects at the center of a variety of sense-making processes: embodied, felt, emotional, intellectual, and intersubjective. It also makes changes in identity that come about through aesthetic experience central to our analysis. In considering the potential of "lived experience," the authors will examine the associated experiences of viewing and making art. The authors will argue that examining these experiences would benefit from a qualitative methodology and a focus on selfhood. The authors sketch the outlines of such an approach by examining relevant work from Dewey, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin. For these authors, creating an account of art also involves constructing an ontology of lived experience.