Critical Perspectives on Activity: Explorations Across Education, Work, and Everyday Life

The last two decades have seen an international explosion of interest in theories of mind, culture, and activity. This unique collection is the first to explicitly reach back to the tradition’s original critical impulse within which the writings of Karl Marx played such a central role. Each author pushes this impulse further to address leading contemporary questions. It includes a diverse array of international scholars working from the fields of education, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, communications, industrial relations, and business studies. Broken into three main sections - education, work, and everyday life - each chapter builds from an analysis of practice and learning as social cultural participation and historical change in relation to the concept of activity, contradiction, and struggle. This book offers insight into an important complex of overlapping practices and institutions to shed light on broader debates over such matters as the ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘lifelong learning’.

• International and interdisciplinary collection • First edited collection of forefront critical perspective in the tradition • Overview chapter that provides an integrative approach to detailed studies of education, work, and everyday life which is usually dealt with separately

Part I: 1. Introduction: exploring activity across education, work, and everyday life Peter H. Sawchuk, Newton Duarte and Mohamed Elhammoumi; Part II. Critical Perspectives on Theory: 2. Is there a Marxist psychology? Mohamed Elhammoumi; 3. The cultural-historical activity theory: some aspects of development Joachim Lompscher; 4. Epistemological scepticism, complacent irony: investigations concerning the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty Maria Celia Marcondes de Moraes; Part II. Education: 5. The importance of play in pre-school education: naturalisation versus Marxist analysis Alessandra Arce; 6. Estranged labor learning Ray McDermott and Jean Lave; 7. Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions: a CHAT analysis of college teachers Helena Worthen and Joe Berry; Part III. Work: 8. Contradictory class relations in work and learning: some resources for hope D. W. Livingstone; 9. From labor process to activity theory Paul S. Adler; 10. Values, rubbish and workplace learning Yrjö Engeström; Part IV. Everyday Life: 11. Education as mediation between the individual’s everyday life and the historical construction of society and culture by humankind Newton Duarte; 12. Activity and power: everyday life and development of working-class groups Peter H. Sawchuk.