Editorial: at the intersection of multiple research fields

We are pleased to introduce a new issue of Mind, Culture and Activity, in which the journal’s commitment with innovative interdisciplinary scholarship becomes tangible through the diversity of works included. Opening with a paper that examines how an entire village learns and going through papers that look at such diverse issues as children’s grief, conceptualizations of women in medical care, and the role of sound in escape rooms, Issue 3 illustrates the Mind, Culture, and Activity journal'’s position at the intersection of a multiplicity of research fields. Academic discourses and concerns from such disparate fields as education, health care, sound studies, and human geography meet in these pages. Across the articles, an interest in the cultural nature of human cognition and activity, and an ambition to go beyond established scholar traditions, are shared. The issue includes six research articles and one book review. We hope the readers will find these contributions inspiring and interesting.

We continue to develop Cultural Praxis¹ as an interactive platform for extending the types of scholarly work that we publish, and as an arena for dialogical, critical, and activist projects. We include below an overview of recent publications and opportunities for participation in Cultural Praxis. We invite authors and readers of Mind, Culture, and Activity to consider contributing as we build this collaborative platform and to contact us with publication proposals, suggestions, and any other feedback.

Research articles in this issue

In “The Village that Learns: A Learning Journey across Intraventions and Domains over Two Decades in a Rural Thai Community,” Deborah A. Fields, Luis Morales-Navarro, and Paulo Blikstein document a small Thai viallage’s transformative learning journey over 24 years. While the idea of extending the unit of analysis beyond the individual is commonplace in sociocultural research (Greeno & Engeström, 2014), not many studies have examined the learning of an entire village as the primary unit of analysis. In their case study, Fields, Morales-Navarro, and Blikstein draw from multiple biographic interviews and historical documents, tracing the village’s agency as it shifted from a subsistence agricultural community that was in debt, into a community known for its sustainable environmental, agricultural, and financial initiatives. In doing so, the authors draw on the notion of intraventions, which has been defined as those efforts in which “collectives conduct formative interventions on themselves to address unsustainable contradictions and transform their activities” (Sannino et al., 2016, p. 600). Accordingly, the authors retrace the history of the development of the village in terms of the ways it addressed its own problems and challenges through interventions that were facilitated by emerging, local learning ecologies, leading to the village’s expansive learning and development.

With their paper, “Children’s grief: Repertoires of practices in institutional early childhood education and care,” Lasse Lipponen and Annukka Pursi address a lacuna in the literature that feels especially pressing right now. Their study of grief in an early childhood education and care institution includes an investigation into separation, absence of a parent, and social exclusion. In doing so, the study offers a rare focus on how both the adults and the children organize their social encounters and interactional history. With their sensitively designed research methods and beautiful figures, they allow the reader to respectfully feel some of the grief that the children are expressing. They make a powerful argument for the multifaceted nature of grief and against the pathologizing of grief. This paper takes us into the workings of an early childhood classroom with a theoretical lens that allows us to see what is happening there with nuance, the nuance necessary to generate findings that support all of our rights to grieve, and to be heard expressing our grief.

Also focusing on children, the current issue includes an article by Michal Gleitman & Bracha Nir titled “Where did You Go To? Recognizing Child Agency as it Emerges Dynamically in Interaction.” The authors raise here a critique of commonplace instrumentalized perspectives in which child agency is treated as “a means toward predefined learning goals that have been deemed socially valuable and desirable by others (i.e. adults).” Through an in-depth discourse analysis of a single shared book-reading activity between a mother and her toddler, the article provides a fresh perspective on this “gentle domestication” of child agency. Key to their approach is the attention given to the unfolding interaction from the perspective of the child, instead of relying on predetermined categories or assumptions belonging to the adults’ goals and guidance. Their analyses reveal ways in which the child genuinely contributes to the unfolding of the reading session, which would have otherwise gone unnoticed. The authors argue for the need to include closer attention to children’s access to power and legitimacy in interaction, when studying and theorizing issues of agency.

“Not just Mechanical Birthing Bodies: Articulating the Impact of Imbalanced Power Relationships in the Birth Arena on Women’s Subjectivity, Agency, and Consciousness,” by Orli Dahan and Sarah Cohen Shabot, is a conceptual analysis of Western birthing practices that cause harm to women. Women’s lived bodies have remained understood in obstetric practices in strictly biomedical terms as precultural, ahistorical, passive objects of medical intervention. The authors show how medical interventions cause physical and emotional mistreatment of birthing women, discounting the role of their agency and subjectivity in the birthing process. They claim that experiences of women during childbirth, their fear, their pain, the control they have over their own bodies, are all important factors in the constitution of a consciousness that promotes healthy physiological childbirth. By showing the importance of cultural practices and social ordering of medical work for the constitution of women’s physical bodies and consciousness during childbirth, Dahan and Cohen Shabot aim to extend the prevailing biomedical model of the body that dominates Western obstetric practices.

Elaborating an original definition of agency as “feeling safe enough to be able to lose control,” the authors describe the phenomenon of birthing consciousness that is biological as much as it is phenomenological and cultural. Accordingly, the authors simultaneously develop a biological, even chemical, analysis of women’s birthing consciousness, and a critical cultural analysis of Western medicalization of childbirth. Although the authors do not use Susan Leigh Star’s term “boundary object” (Star, 1989), their concept of birthing consciousness could be thought of as a strategy to pursue an original interdisciplinary direction. The argument draws on the fields of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience in order to make it legible to medical discourses, which hold epistemic authority in the birth arena. The authors thus do the challenging work of double coding to develop an interdisciplinary proposition across disciplinary orthodoxies, theoretical commitments, and audiences to change common birth practices that cause obstetric violence and subjugation of women today.

Meeting at the intersection of sound studies, human geography, and sociocultural research, the paper “Sounding Escape: Examining the Sonic Contours of Play and Story in The Author’s Enigma,” Jon Wargo, Melita Morales, Ali R. Blake, and Joseph Madres examine sound “as a design feature and more-than-representational resource” in the co-production of play at a escape room. The authors present a helpful review of research from an emerging genre of gaming that has otherwise received limited attention in play literature. But the main contribution lies in the study’s attention to sound as a critical aspect of how gaming activity takes place in the hybrid space that escape rooms provide. As many sociocultural researchers do, the paper draws from the notion of mediation (Cole, 1996) to account for the ways in which sound becomes part of the gaming action being examined. But sound, the authors argue, does more than mediate action: it also becomes an affective atmosphere, a notion the authors elaborate by drawing from human geography notions on spatiality. In this way, the authors offer novel considerations of sound as part of human action’s multimodal nature, as well as relate to discussions on the theoretical significance of mediation (e.g., Roth & Jornet, 2019). They also present a novel methodological contribution, offering a way of annotating sound that makes it possible to trace affective atmospheres as they emerge in situated action during gaming activities.

Book reviews

Anu Kajamaa and Juha Tuunainen write a book review of “A Cultural Historical Approach to Social Displacement and University-Community Engagement: Emerging Research and Opportunities,” by Underwood et al. (2021). The book explores university-community engagement as a collaborative response to the pervasive social displacement, environmental risk, and ongoing racism that impact our communities worldwide. Through its nine chapters and 298 pages, the book condenses experiences and insights gained over 20 years of university-community research collaborations carried trough the University-Community Links (UC Links). Kajamaa and Tuunainen provide additional insight by connecting the history of work presented in the book to broader issues of contemporary concern involving the systemic boundaries that exist between universities and communities (i.e. science-society relations).

Cultural Praxis

A series of “Coffee Hour” dialogs organized by MCA’s founding editor Michael Cole have been published. In these dialogues, authors have the opportunity to discuss their recently published works and ongoing projects with other Cultural Praxis readers and members. The most recent Coffee Hour dialogs include a discussion with James Wertsch on the topic “Habits of Collective Memory²;” a discussion with Andrew Coppens on the work “Ecologically Strong: Toward a Strengths-Based and Ecologically Valid Developmental Science³;” and a discussion with Mariëtte de Haan on “The Limits and Potential of Dialogue to counter Polarization in Educative Settings.⁴” The sessions are always announced in advance, and readers who are interested in joining are encouraged to take contact with Michael Cole at [email protected]

We have also launched a new seminar series entitled “Imagination and Creativity in Vygotsky’s Works,” an initiative led by Francine Smolucha.⁵ This video seminar allows a real time, ongoing, exchange of ideas among people interested in Vygotsky’s writings on imagination and creativity. Video recording of previous talks and links to relevant readings are available on Cultural Praxis. Readers interested in participating in the sessions are encouraged to take contact with Francine at [email protected].

Cultural Praxis is committed to publishing works in multiple languages whenever possible. We have previously published in Spanish and Portuguese (in addition to English). We have recently and for the first time published in Russian and in English a video and text-based discussion originally recorded during the online symposium Renaissance CHAT (Cultural-Historical Activity Theory) in response to calls of the 21st century.⁶ The session was part of a conference in memory of Elena Evgenievna Kravtsova, granddaughter of L.S. Vygotsky. The theme of the conference was Actual problems of cultural-historical psychology, and it took place in Novosibirsk, Russia, on November 17–19, 2020.

These and other publications, as well as the possibilities of publishing materials and joining in ongoing dialogues, can be found at https://culturalpraxis.net

Notes

1. https://culturalpraxis.net

2. https://culturalpraxis.net/coffee-hour-with-mike-cole-2/

3. https://culturalpraxis.net/coffee-hour-with-andrew-coppens-2/

4. https://culturalpraxis.net/coffee-hour-with-mariette-de-haan/

5. https://culturalpraxis.net/imagination-and-creativity-in-vygotskys-works-seminar-series/

6. https://culturalpraxis.net/симпозиум-в-новосибирске-возрождени/