Anna Stetsenko

In addressing the persistent challenge of fully integrating individual dimensions and human subjectivity within the cultural-historical activity theory, this paper suggests several steps to revise its core onto-epistemology in an expansive approach termed the transformative activist stance. This approach outlines the subtle dialectics of individual and collective planes of human praxis whereby each individual is shaped by collective history and collaborative practices while at the same time shaping and real-izing them through contributing to their collective, dynamic materiality in moving beyond the status quo. In capitalizing on people always transcending what exists in ‘the here and now,’ in a non-adaptive fashion, based in a commitment and vision to how the world “ought to be,” the individual subjectivity is reclaimed as itself a fully social, embodied, material-discursive process. Individual subjectivity and agency gain status through contributing to changes in “collectividual” practices as the primary onto-epistemology of a unitary realm that is individual and social/collective at the same time

Given the sociopolitical crisis and turmoil in the world today, there is a great need for philosophical and sociocultural critiques that are not only concerned with deconstructing the present and the past but also with offering forward-looking, radical solutions to the problems and challenges we face. Drastic times call for drastic measures, including in exploring and advancing a flagrantly partisan scholarship with explicitly transformative activist agendas of strengthening the public and personal agency needed to constrain capital for the sake of social and economic justice. The argument advanced in this article is that Marxism – reinvigorated, re-envisioned and infused with insights from recent scholarship in feminism, critical pedagogy, cultural-historical and critical race theories, and new materialism, among others – can offer a new worldview in which political imagination and other phenomena of human subjectivity find their due, that is, central and formative place to thus allow for the advancement of research with activist agendas as a form of resistance. In utilizing such a worldview, research and theoretical constructions can break away from the ethos of adaptation and instead to actively strive for social transformation based in a radical reworking of the status and role of political imagination and associated notions of agency, hope, and commitment.

The book suggests a transition from a relational worldview premised on the socio-political ethos of adaptation towards a transformative worldview premised on the ethos of solidarity and equality. Expansively developing Vygotsky's revolutionary project, the Transformative Activist Stance integrates insights from a vast array of critical and sociocultural theories and pedagogies and moves beyond their impasses to address the crisis of inequality. This captures the dynamics of social transformation and agency in moving beyond theoretical and political canons of the status quo. The focus is on the nexus of people co-creating history and society while being interactively created by their own transformative agency. Revealing development and mind as agentive contributions to the 'world-in-the-making' from an activist stance guided by a sought-after future, this approach culminates in implications for research with transformative agendas and a pedagogy of daring. Along the way, many key theories of mind, development and education are challenged and radically reworked.