Chapter 16: Social and Psychological Movement: Weaving Individual Experience Into Society

It is not only a great honor, but incredibly productive, for us to read the foregoing commentaries. Our aspiration, over ten years ago, was that June’s diary would become a shared empirical basis for substantive theoretical discussions; a dream that has now come to fruition. We are inspired by the insights which colleagues have brought to the data, and we have learned from the rigorous questioning of our terms and assumptions.

Our aim, in the opening chapter, was bold: to propose a model of the relation between the individual and society with movement, both spatial and psychological, as the interconnecting term. This model, we believe, provides one explanation for why humans are dialogical, having multiple often contradictory tendencies, within which agency arises. The reason is that the social world comprises multiple, often contradictory, contexts, and as people move through the social world they are socialized into, or internalize, society from multiple standpoints within society. Our most macro argument was simply that sociocultural psychology needs to pay more attention to social and psychological movement, as a way to operationalize ideas about temporality in research. Our more specific argument was that movement in the social world leads to the accumulation of many layers of experience, which stand in dialogical relation to one another, and which drive the psychological struggle for integration.