This paper introduces cross-sensory expressive patterns as a descriptive unit for tracing continuity across changing bodily, sensory, and material realizations. A vignette, drawn from two years of therapy with a seven-year-old autistic boy and documented in clinical notes, follows an organization identified across three activities. In each, a body part travels along a surface while maintaining contact, then moves into a pressure-marked culmination, enacted through tongue, foot, or hands. The organization becomes interactionally consequential when the therapist answers its timing, direction, and intensity through another form, and the child alters his activity in response. Variation is the medium in which continuity becomes perceptible and available for participation. Drawing on vitality, co-regulation, participatory sense-making, and developmental accounts of participation, we distinguish real-time changes in what becomes possible from broader changes in capacity. The vignette offers a developmental question: can continuity through variation alter what participation becomes across encounters and over time?
Doctoral education requires continuous identity negotiation within systems grounded in neuronormativity. Late-diagnosed neurodivergent doctoral students face unique challenges navigating masking, disclosure, and self-advocacy in academic environments that privilege conformity and penalize difference. This exploratory review of the literature addresses a critical gap in scholarship, which has primarily focused on undergraduates and early-diagnosed populations, leaving the experiences of late-diagnosed doctoral students largely unexplored. Guided by disability critical race theory (DisCrit) and self-authorship theory, this review synthesizes empirical and conceptual literature to illuminate how neuronormative structures and developmental processes intersect to shape scholarly identity construction. The review examines key identity processes – masking, shutdown, burnout, disclosure, and self-advocacy – as overlapping responses to systemic pressures. The authors reveal that sustained masking depletes cognitive and emotional resources, leading to burnout and necessitating difficult decisions about disclosure and authenticity. Recommendations for transforming institutional practices, supervisory relationships, and professional standards are offered to create neurodiversity-affirming environments in which self-advocacy serves as an act of resistance and leadership rather than mere survival.
The distinction between a subjective interior (mind) and an objective exterior (body) plays a central role in stimulating the antinomy between quantitative and quantitative methods. Because they are said to draw on objective observations, quantitative methods provide ways to identify general statistical relations between variables. Because they rely on interpretive analyses of experience, qualitative methods are often seen as less scientific than quantitative ones. However, the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods is founded on a false dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. What we call “objective” observations of behavior cannot occur independent of already shared knowledge about “subjective” or hidden experiences. Conversely, we cannot identify “subjective” experience without words that have their origins in public expressions. What we call “objective” and “subjective” are each derived from a prior capacity for intersubjective engagement. From an intersubjective framework, the distinction between qualitative and quantitative methodology fades.
Both social and autonomous learning have been extensively studied in developmental science; nevertheless, questions remain about their relationship and when and how the two processes can work together. In this review, we first introduce the concepts of social and autonomous learning and then present findings about their relationship through the lens of a two-dimensional framework that considers the presence of social signals and the sense of autonomy as separate dimensions. We then discuss how the interaction of these two types of learning processes aids children in acquiring veridical and socially shared knowledge. These claims are discussed with regard to how the contribution of the two processes manifests in informal and formal contexts, such as play, innovation, and education, and their potential implications for future research.
As a transdisciplinary notion, context has been defined in numerous ways. To clarify it, I present three contrasting perspectives on context: context as a variable, as a co-construction, and as dialogue. To do so, I first draw on a post-Piagetian strand, which, in the 1970s, explored the role of context in development. I then turn to sociocultural psychology, which investigated interaction processes in assessment or learning situations. Finally, I focus on a dialogical approach to context, inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, and identify four types of dialogical tensions: dialogical tensions between situations, between speakers’ positions, between addresses, and between voices. I show that a dialogical conception of context is linked to a conception of the Self where Ego and Alter form an inseparable unit, testifying to the dialogicality of the human mind. I also address methodological issues related to the application of a dialogical approach in psychology.
