In support of social movements that fight for freedom and liberation, and against racial and ecological injustices, we take the opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to scholarship that cares about its sociopolitical role as a transformational agent. We continue our efforts in this regard through our editorial activities and we invite our readers to follow and engage with the calls and works published on the Taylor & Francis websiteFootnote1 and the supplementary Cultural Praxis website.Footnote2
The current issue includes a symposium exploring the connections between two scholars of great relevance in the fields of linguistics, education, and human development, Michael A. K. Halliday – who sadly passed away in 2018, when this symposium was in the early stages – and Lev S. Vygotsky. These connections were of concern also to Ruqaiya Hasan whose works figure in the symposium discussions and are key to the development of social semiotics. The connections between the research programs of these scholars were cogently drawn in the work of another key figure, Gordon Wells, who sadly left us very recently. We are saddened by the untimely loss of such an important figure, many of whose works were published in Mind, Culture, and Activity, and we dedicate this issue to the memory of Gordon Wells.
An article by Jay Lemke introduces the symposium and presents readers with core preliminary notions concerning the interrelationships among Halliday and Vygotsky that are relevant for approaching the papers. Lemke walks the reader through key aspects of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), discussing how each paper in the symposium uses Halliday to extend or complement Vygotsky’s theory of language and development. The symposium includes papers by James R. Martin, Bronwyn Parker and Helen Harper, Mariana Achugar, and David Kellogg. The editorial work by Mike Cole and Jennifer Vadeboncoeur was crucial in the initiating and shaping of the symposium.
In addition, the current issue includes two original articles and two book reviews, each of which reflects different but connected issues of contemporary scholarship on issues of mind, culture, and activity as these are relevant to the current historical context. The issues include an attention to practices of care as constitutive of human existence, the centrality of activism as a practice of social change and as a framework for scholarly praxis, the need to continue regenerating CHAT scholarship by both exploring further and reconsidering its epistemological roots, and the usefulness of this kind of framework to reconceptualize how local communities shape their everyday psychology in and through cultural praxis.
In “The temporality of becoming: care as an activity to support the being and becoming of the other,” Federica Raia writes that she makes visible “the practice of care through the analysis of the moment-to-moment interactions between a patient and a doctor … I expand Heidegger’s ontological understanding of being-in-the-world and develop relational ontology theory to study the practice of caring–for-the-Other who needs to develop a new sense of being-in-the-world.”
The paper deals with care as both care for others and care for oneself, drawing on Heidegger’s presentation of care/sorge as existential structure “constituted by Past, Present, and Future,” as a means of showing how a medic and a critically ill patient requiring a heart transplant can sometimes in their dialogue negotiate a new sense of a future, a developmental process of becoming a new person. At the same time, the medic also gives meaning to their professional identity as a carer.
“Prefigurative Brazilian ativismo through the lens of the transformative activist stance: renewing radical political imagination through ‘collectividual’ agency” by André Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales, Eduardo Vianna, Flávio Fernandes Fontes, and Silvio Yasui, explores the enactment of prefigured futures in the present, with a study of high school protests in late 2015 in Brazil. The government planned to merge schools to save money, which would have resulted in overcrowding and fewer schools. The students successfully fought back, using decentralized structures emphasizing collective action and individual responsibility. This heartening example of social gain must be seen in the context of global social movements, many of which continue to be quashed by the powerful, such as recent events in Hong Kong (HK) have shown. Most activists have left the city, some have been arrested, and a professor/organizer was fired by Hong Kong University. HK activists deployed decentralized strategies and pressed for each person to step up to make decisions and take action, much as we learn about the Brazilian students in this paper. It reminds us of the need to continually place empirical work in global framings and to engage comparative, historical perspectives as we struggle to understand how to achieve meaningful change.
There are two book reviews in this issue. Liubov Vetoshkina’s review of Rethinking Cultural-historical Theory: A Dialectical Perspective to Vygotsky by Manolis Dafermos considers an effort to reexamine Vygotsky’s work and legacy. Vetoshkina says Dafermos reconstructs the development of Vygotsky’s theory in its sociohistorical, scientific, and biographical contexts and provides a dialectical exploration of Vygotsky’s work as science in the making. Vetoshkina notes that the book makes a valuable contribution to discussions on the methodology and epistemology of psychology, and of the educational and social sciences by offering a dialectical framework of creativity in science.
In the second review, Artin Goncü discusses Self-esteem in Time and Place: How American Families Imagine, Enact, and Personalize a Cultural Ideal by Peggy J. Miller and Grace E. Cho. The book review summarized their proposal for a cultural-historical investigation of self-esteem, a concept familiar from psychological research and psychometric methodology. The ethnographic study in focus was conducted in a small Midwestern town using a wide range of data collection methods, including documentation of local cultural forms (e.g., school fliers and lyrics of pop songs), interviews with parents of different ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic groups, as well as observations of family life.
Goncü sums up the contribution of the book as showing that “self-esteem is not an abstracted and distant phenomenon, rather it is a living entity that emerges from children’s relationships, activities, and material environment.” Goncü notes that the authors’ detailed and comprehensive ethnographic field work highlights the power and significance of the holistic perspective offered by the cultural-historical research approach. He praises the book as a prime example of how cultural-historical scholarship should be – but rarely is – practiced.
Recent publications in Cultural Praxis
Article, by James Wertsch. Is it Smart to Humiliate China?
http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/2020/06/04/is-it-smart-to-humiliate-china/
Building on ideas of Vygotsky, Luria, and Cassirer about the semiotic mediation of human discourse and mind, this short article assumes that national narratives are crucial, but little recognized forces in shaping national memory. In this case, the focus is on the “Century of Humiliation” national narrative in China that is often in the background as the PRC interacts with other countries. It is a national narrative that virtually every Chinese person knows, but it remains almost totally unknown in the U.S. One consequence is that the U.S. sometimes naively wades into some of the most emotionally loaded aspects of Chinese national identity with some grave consequences that are recognized only after the damage of grave insult and injury has been done. Understanding these issues of national narratives and memory amounts to an exercise in applied sociocultural studies and indeed may be possible only by carrying this out.
The article is an earlier draft version of an op-ed published at the South China Morning Post.
Article, by Anna Harris and John Harris, TT01: Playing in the Pandemic. http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/2020/07/08/tt01-playing-in-the-pandemic/
In this short article, Anna Harris reflects on the unexpected rewards of parenting as an academic during the COVID-19 lockdown. Inspired by her father’s hand-drawn comic series and the activity of making papier-mâché models with her three-year-old son, she explores how this playful engagement across three generations can enrich, rather than detract, from her scholarly work on material culture in medical education.
Educational Resources, by David Preiss, Enseñanza Universitaria Durante el COVID-19: 10 Principios Pedagógicos [Higher Education During COVID-19: 10 Pedagogical Principles]. http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/2020/06/03/ensenanza-universitaria-durante-el-covid-19-10-principios-pedagogicos/
Written both in Spanish and English, David Preiss offers a personal reflection, from his point of view as university educator, on 10 principles he has drawn up for himself (and others) that remind us of and help us consider our responsibilities and duties as educators in times of crisis.
Educational Resources, by Learners’ Voices collective. Re-generating CHAT Online Symposium “Learning from Learners: Power, Resistance and Learners’ Voices in an Era of Uncertainty.” http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/2020/07/11/re-generating-chat-online-symposium-learning-from-learners-power-resistance-and-learners-voices-in-an-era-of-uncertainty/
One outcome of the Re-generating CHAT project (www.re-generatingchat.com) is an online invited symposium that was held as part of the European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) SIG conference on July 1–3, 2020. A recording of the session has been uploaded to Cultural Praxis and can be accessed in the link above.