Taking up Lemke’s (2000) critical questions of how moments add up to lives and social life, we articulate theoretical and methodological frameworks for perezhivanie and becoming, challenging binaries that splinter entangled flows of perezhivanie into frozen categories. Working from a flat CHAT notion of assemblage to develop an ontology of moments, we stress consequentiality, arguing it emerges in intersections of embodied intensities (not only affective, but also indexical, intra-actional, and historic), the dispersed bio-cultural-historical weight of artifacts and practices, and dialogic resonances across moments. Methodologically, we take an ethico-onto-epistemological perspective to systematically study perezhivanie. The bio-ecological model of rich environments (centered around meaningful complexity, agency, and individual optimization) offers both a key framework for understanding becoming and a design framework for transdisciplinary realizations of ethico-onto-epistemological practice. We illustrate these frameworks with examples from four research projects: a university physics lab group doing and writing an experiment, a former pastor managing bipolar disorder and rejecting faith, a sustained social justice education program at a university, and intersections of aging policies, media representations, and stroke survival in Brazil. Finally, we argue that an ontology of moments centered on consequentiality can illuminate perezhivanie's relationship to becoming and that the model of enriched environments offers metrics to assess and design environments.
This study responds to recent calls for the revitalization of the Vygotskian radical legacy and the reclamation of critical uses of cultural-historical research through a retrospective analysis of two case studies. The first case study describes the development and application of a discourse-based formative intervention framework to reveal psychological processes associated with reimagining and enacting possible futures among early adolescent Black girls. The second presents the FutureMaking Learning Lab’s efforts to address racial injustice in school discipline and empower parents and school personnel to collectively envision a culturally responsive, inclusive school system. Importantly, these case studies represented epistemological, methodological, and axiological expansions of formative intervention methodology through efforts to amplify the voices of participants and leverage their experiential knowledge through interactive participation structures and researchers’ integration of critical theoretical lenses to devise and employ mediating artifacts. These, in turn, support participants’ transformative agency to criticize current practices, ideologies, and structures, and imagine possible futures
This article showcases the potential of dialogue within cultural historical research (CHR) to enhance our understanding of and advocacy for inclusivity in schools. It illustrates how the authors, each rooted in distinct subfields – cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and romantic science – employ a unique approach to knowledge production regarding inclusive classrooms. By refraining from the pursuit of agreement and instead fostering an environment where their studies are juxtaposed, the authors engage in what they term “inclusive coauthoring,” approaching each other’s methodologies with an asset-based, solidarity-seeking stance. The first author utilizes excerpts from an ethnographic study in an elementary classroom to demonstrate how CHAT can elucidate the intricate dynamics of diverse classrooms, shedding light on mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion and identifying potential barriers (opportunities) to inclusive practices. On the other hand, the second author illustrates how a romantic science perspective can empower educators to cultivate inclusivity in ways previously unexplored before their deep engagement with the study. Uniting in collaboration around shared goals rather than shared methods, led the authors to unforeseen advancements, particularly in one of the studies.
The funds of knowledge of bilingual preservice teachers (BPSTs) are undervalued in the U.S. predominantly White teacher education space. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate and integrate the overlooked knowledge and epistemologies of BPSTs into teacher preparation. To do so, we conducted a secondary analysis of Play-Doh pictures and narrative generated by the BPSTs from a multi-year change laboratory (CL) intervention, which took place in one graduatelevel practicum seminar, enabling the participants to tell their stories and express their voices in multimodal ways. By applying Rabardel’s notion of instrumentality to preservice teachers’ imaginative work with Play-Doh, the study describes how the art-mediated instrumental approach supported BPSTs to co-reflect on their articulation of teaching. Implications of using culturalhistorical research to study teacher education are discussed.
This systematic literature review aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the research which documents experiences of school-aged students with disabilities who are houseless in the public education system in the U.S. I use cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as a theoretical framework to identify contradictions within and between activity systems (i.e., schools, shelters, families, etc.), all ostensibly committed in supporting these students. According to the National Center for Homeless Education (2020), students with disabilities accounted for 18% of all houseless students in 2020, a 15% increase from the previous school year. While many studies have addressed issues faced by students who are houseless, to our knowledge none have examined the ways in which disability factors into these experiences, especially as students navigate the complexities of being both houseless and disabled. This synthesis has implications for how schools and educators serve students at the intersections of disability and houselessness.
The purpose of this exploratory study is to further investigate the cultural contexts under which pre-service teachers develop their mathematics identities. We reviewed pre-service teachers’ mathematics autobiographies that include a description of their math abilities, their perceptions of what it means to be a good student of mathematics and the impact of parental/caregiver and teacher relationships on the development of their mathematics identity. The analysis revealed three types of mathematics identities: positive, negative, and neutral and/or ambivalent. It also identified two dimensions of mathematics identity development, the social and the internal. We present implications to teacher preparation including the need to incorporate narrative eliciting assignments in mathematics methods courses.
Professional development is a critical concept in the literature on teaching and teacher education. However, in this literature, continuous growth (learning)—e.g., improve teaching strategies, elaborate a variety of activities or integrate new technologies into their practice—is not distinguished from (crisis-like) change to qualitatively different forms of experience—e.g., engage students in learning, implement student-centered practices, consider students' individual needs and further learning. Based on a case study of the change a Brazilian teacher experienced over the course of an 8-year period, we develop an approach based on ideas of the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky that not only theorizes a distinction between learning and development but also the articulation between the two processes whereby continuous change turns into discontinuous change.
Activist scholarship inspired by a cultural-historical tradition often seeks to foster agency with people facing crisis. The aim is to develop new understandings and bases for action that can help people break away from the status quo and change what is possible. Cultural-historical theory understands crisis and agency dialectically, linking both to individual and social transformation. Dialectic understandings of crisis foreground breakdown and renewal. Dialectic understandings of agency foreground personal contributions with social consequence and contingency. I argue that these understandings are crucial as a point of departure in research where we stand alongside others on grappling with matters of equity and justice. However, establishing these as a shared basis for resisting, reimaging and rebelliously acting is not straightforward and requires countering dominant neoliberal framings. Arts-based forms have significant potential to enable precisely such disruptive thinking. The line ‘Dance on the shark’s wing’, opens a poem by Nikos Kavadias, bluring the lines between the real and the imagined, the fearful and the possible. ‘No One Is Alone’, a song from Sondheim’s ‘Into the Woods’, tells a story of how individual interest is overcome through collective wisdom and consequential action. These examples are discussed as potential transformative tools that could provoke and support collective radical imagination based on coherent understandings of individual agentic contributions to collective struggles. An argument is presented to embrace arts genres as means to destabilise engrained ways of thinking about crisis and agency, thus strengthening collaborative efforts in activist research
This article discusses how the persistence of child labor, especially in Brazil and the United States of America, constitutes a current facet of neo-colonialism. Cultivated as an educational and dignifying activity, exploited child labor persists and is naturalized. Schools, religions, and the legislation contribute to making the working class come to love and naturalize what in the past was understood as torture and punishment, thus jointly acting as a fundamental means of forming a new cultural form: the love of work. Initially, the article discusses how the culture of work is historically founded and then argues against the idealist and postmodern explanations that naturalize it. The argument is based on the understanding that culture has a material basis and is linked to the production and social reproduction of life. Data from the empirical research on child labor in tobacco farming in Brazil and the USA reveal the persistence of the problem among Latino children and families. We conclude with the need to found a new culture for contemporary society, based on other social and economic relations, which allows the working class to free itself from what dominates and exploits it.
Society's understanding of “suffering” and disaster determines how it will be encountered. In the present study, we apply a constructivist approach and study the understanding of November 12, 2017 earthquake in Zahab at the context of the traumatic history of the region. Applying critical ethnography, oral history, field research and in-depth interviews, we found out that the event is understood in the continuation of a history of irrationality and injustice. Narrators share a common fear among marginalized groups: fear of betrayal, to be forgotten and to be ignored. There exists a vital need for creating collective narratives and identities, hearing them, recognizing them and establishing a meaningful relationship between them.
This article contributes to discussions of transmethodology by drawing on experiences from conducting practice research aimed at the development of theory and practice through research collaboration. We analyze efforts to build research communities where researchers and professionals work together to perform analyses and develop knowledge. A collective research project exploring children’s possibilities for participation in school is used as a case for exploring how a research problem develops through such collabora-tion. This research project was designed to explore school life from the perspectives of children, parents, teachers, school leaders, and psychologists, and to analyze conflicts situated in everyday practices while considering political struggles concerning the school as a historical institution. The article emphasizes the often intangible and overlooked processes involved in research collaboration and details how we worked to build a re-search community comprising researchers and professionals that enabled collective mul-ti-perspective analyses. Building on a dialectical approach, we conceptualize conflicts as part of historical processes and as an immanent potentiality that arises from people’s engagement in common but contradictory matters. Hence, the different perspectives of those involved in children’s school life can be seen as linked through common matters, while also being differentiated by their allotted tasks in relation to children’s school life. This approach continuously challenged the researchers to analyze everyday conflicts grounded in the different perspectives of those involved, the different forms of reasoning, understandings, and standpoints, as well as how the different perspectives are connected through the participants’ engagement in a common matter – providing good schools for children. The article concludes by arguing that the discussed approach to theory devel-opment can be linked to a situated concept of generalization.
In this article, I present a sensory-based transmethodological research approach based on body-phenomenological conceptualizations of embodied memory and lived experiences, and on cultural-historical conceptualizations of modes of socializing behavior and mediating means as the nexus for personal learning and development. The transmethodology combines sensory methods to study individual research participants’ lived experiences and describe them in detail, and methods to study how these same individuals use sociocultural mediating means in communication and to make meaning of their lived experiences as participants in social communities of practice. The particular methodology was developed during practice research, where we as a research team engaged in embodied and contemplative practices together with student teachers in Denmark to explore how they experienced the effects of contemplative practices on their encounters with students, colleagues, or parents in challenging situations during their education and in school practice as newly educated teachers. The practices of the sensory-based transmethodology created a corpus of qualitative data with the potential to transform our ideas about relationship-building and education.
Students with traumatic brain injury (TBI) are often marginalized in terms of participation in higher education because of an implicit association of TBI with less academic functioning. The first named author is a Ph.D. scholar who aimed to add her voice to the voices of others and examine the lived experience of students with the same condition to identify possible supports that would enhance inclusion in higher education. This research was driven by the desire to illuminate both the hidden nuances of personal experience (hence the use of autoethnography) and to highlight the lack of research about educational participation of TBI survivors. The analysis was from both professional and personal perspectives. Through an examination via an iterative and interconnected research process, the authors explored the question, what are the supports for participation and access for students with TBI in higher education considering the first author’s experiences. Traditional research might provide generalizable data but may not facilitate deep illumination of experience and voice. This examination transcended traditional research and comprised autoethnographic and interview-based inquiry. It challenged the research team to consider different perspectives and to interrogate their own interconnections in the same engagement while working towards the same goal. The concept of transmethodology will be discussed regarding the development of multiple perspectives that can assist in transgressing the common divisions in the theory and practice divide and explores knowledge of marginalization regarding participation for students with TBI. This paper argues for the importance of innovations such as transmethodology when researching deeply personal phenomena.
‘Medically unexplained symptoms’ (MUS), through the lens of the biopsychosocial model, are understood in mainstream psy disciplines and related literature as a primarily psychosocial phenomenon perpetuated by ‘dysfunctional’ psychology on the part of people labelled with such. Biopsychosocial discourse and practice in this field, underpinned by little empirical foundation and lacking theoretical coherency, are associated with harms sustained by people labelled with MUS. Yet, little attention is paid to the psychology of social actors and institutions whose practice and policy derives from biopsychosocial theorising, or whose vested interests (re)produce such theorising. This article contends that lack of reflexivity among psy practitioners and other social actors on individual, institutional and structural levels furthers biopsychosocial hegemony and contributes to harms. Non-reflexive behaviour on the part of practitioners within clinical and ‘therapeutic’ encounters and on the part of social actors within institutions and broader power structures is examined, and possible psychological underpinnings of non-reflexivity are explored. Notably, the concept of gain, drawn from dominant discourse around MUS, is applied broadly to explore what might be gained from eschewing reflexivity and from adhering to biopsychosocial narratives. Implications for practice, supervision, training and research are discussed, notably highlighting a need for critical reflexivity in all domains.
Small, mundane technologies, such as stethoscopes, medicinal bottles, labels, cleaning and dispensing equipment, are integral to the practice of western herbal medicine (WHM) in the UK. A focus on such technologies reveals the dynamic character and porousness of medical systems and allows us to identify cultural interactions. In this photo essay, based on long-term anthropological research, I explore an assemblage of everyday technologies used by WHM practitioners and the ways in which these technologies contribute to shaping diagnostic stories, to performing (bio)medical legitimacy and invoking herbal traditions. The biomedical, herbal and domestic technologies-in-use come into view as vibrant and dynamic objects with highly contingent meanings and identities. Their absorption into this non-biomedical therapy supports the performance of (bio)medical legitimacy, authority, tradition and professionalism, while the use of everyday domestic objects may signal female-coded practices of care. This demonstrates the adaptability of a medical practice situated at the margin of mainstream healthcare and subject to ongoing technological and ideological influence. The strategic integration of this assemblage of everyday technologies into WHM contributes, I suggest, to evoking a competent, trustworthy and time-honoured medical practice, which is simultaneously inscribed with multiple tensions, ambiguities and contestations.
This paper adds a phenomenological account to the discussion on what constitutes the favorable prospects of the peer-relation in the context of self-help. By drawing on Heidegger’s lectures on St Paul’s First Thessalonians, and engaging in dialogue with a fictive case, we show that more attention needs to be given to how meaning is enacted, rather than simply adopted, in the peer-relation; that is, away from experiential content towards the process of how experiential knowledge is transferred communicatively. This, we argue, may clarify the underpinnings of the peer-relation and its emancipatory potential. Our findings propose a reconsideration of the role played by communicative activities in self-help. And, whereas storytelling has often been propounded as a way to facilitate agency among self-helpers, also the act of listening should receive more attention. By considering listening as an expression of agency, attention is reversed from self-narration on behalf of the person expected to be helped from it, to participation in another person’s story. The enaction approach to the peer-relation elaborated on in this paper invites the reader to rethink the value of talking and listening in helping relationships.
This article presents the authors’ collaboration with a former gang leader, referred to as X, as part of a research project exploring identity transformation and mo(ve)ments beyond gang engagement. The project is based on a transmethodological approach that involves different embodied researcher positionalities, theoretical engagements, and a merging of diverse research fields. The exploration of the different movements and changes in X’s life is based on, what we call a transmethodological mo(ve)ment ethnography, exploring mo(ve)ments of transformation of identity, engagement and community in the everyday life of X, who is striving to become a good, practicing Muslim. This approach makes it possible to go into depth with key moments of change in a subject’s life and pursue them from different theoretical perspectives by integrating and transgressing concepts, analytical gazes and positionalities. To analyze and understand the former gang leader’s life and process of transformation, we utilize poststructuralist and decolonial theory and integrate these approaches with those of social practice theory and critical psychology. In this article, we examine how we as researchers can transverse different theoretical and embodied positionings, analyzing transmethodology as closely linked to the positioning of the researcher, and ultimately pointing towards an emancipatory form of research practice.
