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.
