About me
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. Her PhD was funded by the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme.
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).
Teaching
I teach social and developmental psychology modules. I supervise PG/UG research projects using various qualitative approaches. Current student topics include: spirituality for counselling practice, care support worker' wellbeing, ADHD in secondary schools, body image and social media, body positivity, Filipino psychology, discursive construction of female criminals, etc.
I have been guest-lecturing in various universities in UK, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, China, Brazil and Japan on discourse analysis, discursive psychology and sociocultural theory. I also give workshops to PG students on developing research from cultural psychological perspectives at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Research
I am interested in examining language use and social relations configured and reconfigured in social and cultural practices. 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 peace and reconciliation practices, to exploring dialogic space in and outside schools and archiving as social remembering. 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.
Publications
For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.