Revisiting and Reviving Activism and Commitment to Social Equality and Justice From a Transformative Activist Stance

• In Event: Being/Becoming an Activist Scholar: Lessons From Cultural-Historical Activity Research

Abstract

As education is facing the challenges of increasingly aggressive marketization and privatization that subordinate education to free market economic interests, drain it of its aspirational goals and increase inequality, the call to activism and resistance becomes more relevant and urgent than ever. Drawing on traditions of political consciousness, imagination and activism that have been drastically curtailed in recent decades under the weight of empiricist and objectivist ideology, this presentation will outline steps to reviving these traditions by expanding on the radical theories of Vygotsky, and also Freire, Bakhtin, and other critical and sociocultural scholars, while critically engaging and interrogating their ideas and grappling with their contradictions. The key premise is that human agency and activism in carrying out and realizing changes in the shared, communal practices of the social world is a natural part of the material reality and the key dimension of ontology and epistemology of human development. What lies beneath this premise is a deeper-seated layer of commitment to, and a vision for, a better future that is ineluctably social, moral, and political at once. The core attempt is to advance, in collaboration with other critically minded scholars and educators, a method of theory and a theory of method that are based in an irrevocable commitment to social equality and justice, to the task of building a new, better education and psychology for a new, better society in which people have equal rights especially with regards to equal access to education, and to social supports and cultural mediations that they need in order to realize their development. The broad political ethos at the core of this project and its methodology, resonant with that of Vygotsky, Freire and Bakhtin, counters principles of adaptation and competition for resources as the central grounding for human development and education that takes the “givenness” of the world for granted and assumes that individuals have to passively fit in with its status quo. This project rejects the possibility of quaint epistemology in which the mind is a copy or a reflection of the world because it rejects finiteness, permanence, and stability of social practices and of corresponding forms of social life and human development. Within the worldview that posits reality as human praxis – in the connotation of “world-historical activity” and “history-making action,” that always transcends the status quo through struggles and contestation – the human subjectivity can be understood in its activist incarnation, as an active intervention and a transformative force within the world. Activism conveys the sense that all individuals and communities are immersed within, and are always contributing to, not just the neutral contexts or environments that somehow peacefully “surround” them. Instead, human development is part and parcel of the unfolding drama and struggle that constitute the world infused with conflicts and contradictions, dilemmas, and challenges – which even in their daily expressions and everyday contexts are always about the struggle for transformation of the world (Freire, 1994).

Author

• Anna Stetsenko, City University of New York