Closing a challenging year, strengthening relevant scholarship in cultural studies of mind and activity

We end a year marked by a global pandemic that has taken the lives of more than a million people globally, and has exacerbated and made more visible social and economic inequities that disproportionately affect black and indigenous communities, people of color more generally, and the poor (McLeod et al., 2020; Yaya et al., 2020). The pandemic, like other socioscientific issues of our time such as climate change, has been politicized and has further polarized already polarized societies. It has forced us to distance ourselves physically, and closed educational institutions across the globe, impacting the everyday lives of billions. The pandemic has most severely affected vulnerable and disadvantaged communities that rely on education for many needs other than learning. And all children in lockdown have been robbed of genuine learning experiences which, at young ages, require intimate contact with peers and teachers. It saddens us greatly that we can never ever make this up to the children.

However, physical distancing and lockdowns have not prevented the blossoming of nonviolent mass social movements, which, in 2019, had reached a historical peak (Chenoweth, 2020). A case in point is the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice, which, in terms of the number of people participating in demonstrations and protests, may be “the largest movement in U.S. history” (Buchanan et al., 2020). In Chile, protests in 2019 against precarity and political corruption have continued in a historical referendum in 2020 that scraps a constitution inherited from the era of dictator Pinochet. A new constitution will be penned by a democratically elected representative assembly. In Lebanon, as the pandemic has intensified and made more visible the social and political injustices that have been the focus of revolts, protests have continued both online and offline despite lockdowns and restrictions (Illanas García, 2020). All of these powerful events testify to the crucial role digital tools and social media play in contemporary social movements (e.g., Gutiérrez et al., 2019; Lemos & Da Cunha Júnior, 2018), but also expose the real risks of the repression of free expression and rights to information (UN Human Rights Council, 2020) and the fact that democracy cannot be taken for granted.

At this crucial historical juncture, it is our aim as an editorial collective to continue supporting scholarship on cultural studies of human activity committed to, and at the service of, social and racial justice, as well as to continue scrutinizing our own editorial practices and racial biases. Although – as the summaries below emphasize – the articles and book reviews in the current issue reflect these commitments in varied and important ways, we are aware of the need to do more to unearth Eurocentric, colonial, and in some cases even racist tendencies in our own practices and in the theories that inform our scholarship, including cultural-historical theory (Bang, 2017; see also Rajala & Williams, this issue, for a critique of Hegel’s racism and a discussion of its implications for contemporary applications of his work). We are aware that publishing on Hegel as extensively as we do here, at this unprecedented historical moment, may raise concerns, an issue we discuss in Rajala and Williams' mentioned commentary. As editorial collective, we are working to achieve real structural changes, both through editing relevant works but also by renewing our own editorial structure. In this regard, we welcome Anna Stetsenko as new editor member. With her seminal work developing a transformative activist stance as backdrop (e.g., Stetsenko, 2017), Anna is joining us to continue imagining a more critical and diverse MCA.

The issue opens with an article by Manuel Luis Espinoza, Shirin Vossoughi, Mike Rose, and Luis E. Poza, titled “Matters of Participation: Notes on the Study of Dignity and Learning”. The notion of participation has been central to situated and sociocultural approaches to cognition and activity, where the idea that we learn and develop by becoming legitimate participants in social practices is foundational (Lave, 1996). However, more often than not, the concept of participation–which emerges as a means to critique non-critical (psychological) approaches to learning – are taken up in unreflective ways that, as a result, tend to “domesticate” and disable their emancipating potential (Stetsenko, 2017). Espinoza and colleagues’ study provides a counterpoint, discussing the inherent relation of human dignity and participation. Using the metaphor of a musical composition, the authors present their article as a recurrent riff: “the quality of dignity may inhere in the person, but the experience and sense of dignity are wholly contingent.” By arguing that dignity inheres in human lives, but that its experience and sense is contingent upon social practices, the authors describe participation not simply as a source of learning – as often is elaborated in the literature – but also and intrinsically as an everyday occasion to generate different ways of sensing and experiencing dignity.

The authors connect dignity to the idea of meaningful participation, namely “substantive involvement in socially vital activities.” They explore how vital activities generate different experiences and a sense of dignity in two learning settings: a 1962 voter registration workshop in the Southern United States and a contemporary preparatory program for high school-age migrant students in California. Applying a plural analytical framework that draws from first-, second-, and third-person observational stances, the authors invite us to take the place of the other and understand the vital, dignity-related manifestations and consequences that come with participating in any learning setting.

In “Supporting Teachers’ Task Design Processes: Exploring a Globalization Task Using the Activity Checklist as a Theoretical Framework,” Marcia Håkansson Lindqvist describes the use of the Activity Checklist (based on Kaptelinin and Nardi’s work) to help teachers design a classroom task using digital technology in a Swedish school. She notes that although Sweden has long supported digital technology in schools, use remains low. The literature suggests that teachers themselves must be involved in designing their own ways to use technology if the technology is to be used meaningfully. Lindqvist studied teachers designing a “globalization task” whose objective was to help students understand globalization – what it is, and its impacts for Sweden. The teachers used the Activity Checklist to analyze “The distribution of work … between the teacher and the student, the teacher’s responsibility for help and support, the student’s responsibility for performing learning activities (actions and operations) within the task and producing the outcome.” 
The concrete tool helped teachers operationalize the design task into goals and sub-goals, and helped address conflicts and tensions, e.g., students who lacked motivation for the task or who did not like using digital technology. Lindqvist concluded that if digital technology in schools is to go “beyond routine information searches and classroom writing tasks,” teachers must become more involved, and a tool such as the Activity Checklist can provide analytical purchase for their work.

Reijo Miettinen’s paper, “Hegel’s political and social theory: ethical life (Sittlichkeit) as a historical-institutional context of human development,” argues for the continuing relevance of Hegel, pointing to Hegel’s work on the ethical development of the individual. Miettinen observes: “The main goal of Hegel’s political philosophy is to reconcile the individual with his or her political community in a way that overcomes the alienation of the modern world.” Alienation underlies the grip of right wing politics in many countries in the West, yet we often skate past the deeply political nature of development – as Miettinen puts it so well: “The characterization of the context of human development and self in terms of world, environment, culture, social-material collaborative practices, or even in terms of community, tends to exclude the institutional and political nature of social reality (emphasis added).”

Hegel positions individuality and moral agency as outcomes of participation in institutions of civil society and state. In the sociocultural tradition, however, “culture is mostly understood in terms of shared linguistic meanings, tools, artifacts, and cultural resources essential for individual cognitive development.” Miettinen urges that we study political economy and understand that transformation can only occur through institutions. We must think bigger, beyond individual classrooms and other smaller-scale interventions: “The challenge is … to transform these [smaller-scale] achievements into political goals for institutional reforms and … to expand the interventions and experiments into associations, political movements, and communities of inquiry for institutional reconstructions.” This is a tall order indeed, but one that is increasingly urgent given humanity’s colossal problems and the staggering failures of the capitalist world order with it cycles of oppression, exploitation, inequality, and structural racism.

The book reviews section of this Issue includes reviews of two books which discuss new readings and applications of the works of Vygotsky and Hegel. The first book, Vygotsky’s Theory in Early Childhood Education and Research: Russian and Western Values, edited by Nikolay Veraksa and Sonja Sheridan, is reviewed by Jaakko Hilppö. Hilppö notes that the book sheds light on the varied ways in which Vygotsky’s work has been taken up and interpreted in Russian and Western contexts of research on early childhood education. Hilppö notes that the book makes a solid contribution to cultural-historical, comparative studies of learning and education by extending this line of research to address issues of early childhood education.

The second book, Andy Blunden’s Hegel for Social Movements, is discussed in the format of a Review Dialogue which includes three book reviews and an introductory commentary to the reviews. The Review Dialogue is a new format of book reviews in our journal that consists of 2–3 reviews of the same book and a commentary. The idea is to promote dialogue across a range of perspectives. In this issue the three reviewers, Andrey Maidansky, Reijo Miettinen, and John Krinsky, review Blunden’s book from the perspectives of philosophy, cultural-historical psychology, and social movement studies. The introductory commentary by Antti Rajala and Julian Williams summarizes the points made by the reviewers and comments on what the book has to offer for social movements which are confronted by ecological and health crises that threaten the existence of humanity. Rajala and Williams address an important topic that was not discussed at length by Blunden and the reviewers, namely, the Eurocentrism and colonialism of Hegel and other classical authors of the cultural-historical tradition.

Recent publications in cultural praxis

Article, by Bibi Calderaro, Atasi Das, Katherine E. Entigar, & André L. L. F. Sales, Playing with Conscientização: A Collectividual Project for a World we Wish to See.

http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/2020/08/30/playing-with-conscientizacao-a-collectividual-project-for-a-world-we-wish-to-see/

In this multivoiced piece, four scholars assume and problematize a “we” stance while offering an unconventional, taking up/on of conscientizar/to make aware/concientizar. Authors use a combination of multilingual notions of the concept of “awareness” (conscientizaçao in Portuguese and concientización in Spanish) to elaborate on what “being human” means from their different subject positions, “Each take – languaged, beyond language, situated, political, and historical – emphasizes activity and reflection.”

Video series: join the discussion

http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/category/video-series-join-the-discussion/

This weekly Video Series aims to create a multilingual forum for scholars, teachers, and activists to engage in a critical dialogue about Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) concepts and their relevance for social transformation in the current global crisis. Various topic-based video excerpts are selected from longer interviews and presentations by distinguished CHAT scholars and educators from around the globe.