Research-Activism as Tool and Result

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

Abstract

The social justice activity I most closely resonate with is summed up in this slogan: “All Power to the Developing.” One of its intended meanings is that creating the social, emotional, cultural and intellectual development of all people, no matter their circumstance, is inextricably linked to making qualitative cultural and political change. To me, this “task raised by history” requires a new kind of method, one that following Vygotsky is “simultaneously the tool and the result of study.”
I work to break boundaries and cross borders. To invite people of all ages and places to create development and the communities that support it. To give people ways to stop being critical and become practical-critical. To teach people how to engage with each other in ensemble and development environment building so as to transform their relationships to themselves, to each other and to the institutional gatekeepers of both local and global culture. To help people perform their lives and re-perform this rotten and rotting world.
I worked with Michael Cole in the early years of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition and the emergence of CHAT. What I learned has been integral to my growth as activist-researcher: learning and development are socio-culturally situated; laboratory experiments on human cognition cannot be ecologically valid because you can’t see the social-cultural nature of cognition in the lab; science in general, and the social sciences and psychology in particular, are political; the research psychologists do can be practically relevant; and Lev Vygotsky was a very practical and very political social scientist.
During this time I met community organizers engaged in work that shared some features with the LCHC mission. However, it was grass roots activism, much of it carried out on the streets of NYC’s poorest neighborhoods, and independent of any funding stream—allowing for more freedom to create a new psychology as part of community activism. I chose this route and created an independent location outside the university where my colleagues and I could bring community-based practices and academics together, and could simultaneously develop, study and promulgate a postmodern Marxist, developmentally therapeutic, performatory approach to learning and development, community building and culture change. It is, forty years down the road, one strain within CHAT.
The research-activism dialectic of this strain is the building an international development community in which thousands of people directly participate. Methodologically, the community and its development is the tool-and-result of organizing people to create new ways to relate to each other, to the environments they are in, to culture, to community and to social change. In this process, the institutions of psychology, education and politics and their impact on people’s daily lives are practically-critically engaged.

Author

• Lois Holzman, East Side Institute