Dr Kyoko Murakami
Kyoko Murakami is a lecturer in psychology at the Department of Psychology, the University of Westminster, London and an honorary research fellow at the University of Bath. UK. Previously, she held an associate professorship in psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She received her PhD in psychology at Loughborough University in 2002.
Kyoko PhD thesis, titled Revisiting the past: Social organisation of remembering and reconciliation was funded by the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme. Kyoko's PhD was supervisor by Dr David Middleton and examined by Prof Rom Harré and Prof Steve Brown. She was a member of Discourse and Rhetoric Group, also known as DARG based in Social Sciences, Loughborough University.
Kyoko's research topics include social remembering, reconciliation, learning in collaboration, dialogism and ageing. She is an executive committee member of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology and a member of the editorial board of Culture & Psychology. Her published books include Discursive Psychology of Remembering and Reconciliation (Nova, 2012) and Dialogic Pedagogy (Multilingual Matters, 2016) and Activity Theory: An Introduction (Ibidem, Columbia, 2024).
I am interested in examining language use and social relations configured and reconfigured in social and cultural practices. As a member of research centres in Westminster--Westminster Centre for Psychological Sciences, HOMELandS, Research Centre on Peripheral Populations), I am involved in various projects in exploring COVID-19 related issues and the displacement experiences of diasporic populations and refugees. As my theoretical and methodological orientations, I draw on a social constructionist paradigm including Discourse Analysis, Discursive Psychology and Cultural Psychology/Sociocultural Theory/Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (and open to other approaches such as ethnography and phenomenology). My current research ranges from examining remembering and reminiscence, peace and reconciliation practices, to exploring dialogic space in everyday settings. As my long standing interest in social remembering and reconciliation, I was part of the AHRC network of Silence, Memory and Empathy with cultural studies scholars and museum and heritage professionals.
I am happy to supervise PhD research from cultural, social and discursive psychological perspectives including dialogism including Bakhtinian and Dialogical-Self Theory with qualitative methods.
