Editorial vol. 30 issue 1

Abstract

We open this issue welcoming a new member to our Mind, Culture, and Activity editorial collective, Aydin Bal (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Aydin is Professor of Special Education, and recipient of the 2022 Early Career award of the AERA Cultural-Historical Research SIG. Aydin’s knowledge of cultural-historical theories, as well as his experience and background on the interplay between culture, learning, mental health, and social justice, are invaluable to the journal. Aydin further expands our team, contributing to a more diverse leadership in the editorial work we do. The present issue includes five research articles and a book review. The first research article, by Dosun Ko, Aydin Bal, Aaron Bird Bear, Linda Orie, and Dian Mawene, continues a growing body of research drawing from decolonizing epistemologies (Smith, 2021), formative interventions (Engeström, 2016) and utopian methodologies (Rajala et al., 2022)) to redress issues of social justice through CHAT-informed research. Titled “Learning lab as a utopian methodology for future making: decolonizing knowledge production toward racial justice in school discipline,” the article discusses Learning Labs as a praxis-oriented systemic design intervention that facilitates a dialectical interplay between problem identification, that is, critical reflection on systemic contradictions, and problemsolving, that is, collective design actions. It elaborates the specific case of Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL), where local stakeholders’ engage in transformative future-making efforts to design a culturally decolonizing support system to address racial injustice at a rural high school. Using Levitas (2013) work on utopia as a method as their theoretical lens, the authors examine their critical design ethnography work at the high school. This work documented the school community’s “collective endeavor toward decolonizing the future.” The authors studied the ways in which Native American students, families, tribal community members, and non-Native school staff expanded their future sociopolitical imaginations to envision alternative ways of organizing education. Writing from a different and yet closely related tradition of CHAT scholarship – French-speaking activity-oriented ergonomics – Lucie Cuvelier, in “Constructive activity and expansion of the object: cross-fertilization,” also discusses developmental, intervention-based methodologies, but with an emphasis on theory. Cuvelier’s is an empirically-grounded theoretical essay on the relationship between constructive activity and productive activity, two notions that scholars consider “central in activity-oriented approaches to ergonomics . . . focused on developmental issues.” Drawing on French activity theory (Clot, 2009) and the Finnish tradition of Developmental Work Research initiated by Engeström (2016) and colleagues, Cuvelier hypothesizes that “constructive activity is characterized by the expansion of the object of activity within productive activity.” To test this hypothesis, she conducted an empirical study examining the activities of an anesthetist working in pediatric services at two French university hospitals. This work substantiates the conceptualization of constructive activity as a movement of expansion of the object. A third research article deals with the challenging issue of emotion regulation in young orphan children. Taking a cultural-historical perspective on emotions, and focusing on play as developmental activity, the article, “A cultural-historical study of emotions in play: catharsis and perezhivanie in an institutional care setting,” by Xianyu Meng, Marilyn Fleer, Liang Li, and Marie Hammer, explores how coexperiencing dramatic interactions in playworlds supports a child’s resolution and regulation of emotions in an institutional care setting in China. Theoretically, the article draws on two notions that Vygotsky developed in different periods. First, is the notion of catharsis, developed in his Psychology of Art which argues that catharsis “opens up new possibilities for furthering our understanding of children’s emotional processes in play, where imagination and drama are inherent as they are in art.” The article connects the former with the notion of MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY 2023, VOL. 30, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2023.2248982