Special Issue: “advancing funds of identity theory”

This special issue on Funds of Identity, guest edited by Moisès Esteban-Guitart, is comprised of six research papers and Esteban-Guitart’s response, with collective support from Julian Williams and Alfredo Jornet as host editors. The MCA collective chose to write this overall editorial, initially led by Julian, with Moisès, as we wish to place this Special Issue in conversation with recent developments at MCA that we hope will interest our readers. Readers will have noticed the emergence of the Cultural Praxis website, which includes our statement of commitment and explains the expansion of our editorial collective. We welcome new editors Arturo Cortez (University of Colorado Boulder), Mara Welsh Mahmood (University of California, Berkeley), Monica Lemos (University of Helsinki), and Sophina Choudry (University of Manchester). We hope to expand further in due course. Expanding is not simply a matter of marshaling resources for the growing demands of publishing this journal and the Cultural Praxis website, but also addresses the need to promote and strengthen scholarship related to social movements fighting oppression, and to engage new international contexts and scholarship. These aims find renewed energy in our new editors’ expertise. We also welcome the move of Ivana Guarrasi (University of California, San Diego) from Managing Editor to Editor, and the move of Antti Rajala (University of Oulu) from Book Reviews Editor to Editor. Our editorial expansion is part of a continued commitment to promoting scholarship associated with international social movements that currently receive less attention than they deserve. These include movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as the diaspora of these movements’ members around the world. Our vision for Cultural Praxis involves allowing this work to become known and to evolve into scholarly projects of many formats, including research articles to be published in this journal. We will continue to publish articles addressing the concerns of Mind, Culture, and Activity, while also stimulating new types of work that expand the scope of the journal and foster development and equity in our field. Many of us had the benefit of working together in the Spencer Foundation funded “Regenerating CHAT” project, which has helped us to realize the new vision for the journal and for Cultural Praxis (https://re-generatingchat.com and http://culturalpraxis.net/). As a result, of the Regen project, we are working in interest groups on new projects, one of which, the “Learners’ Voices” group, is preparing papers for a new Special Issue, “Learners’ Voices: Activating Transformative Agency in Lifelong Learning” to be published in this journal. The current Special Issue was also conceived in Regen project’s discussions, as a means of critiquing what was perceived as a domestication of the Funds of Knowledge and Funds of Identity theories and developing a more critical edge to these theories and associated praxis. In the following, we offer some background and history to Funds of Knowledge and Funds of Identity, before we briefly discuss each of the papers. A much more detailed account is given by Moisès in his open access paper (this issue), where he situates the whole issue and its contribution to the field. The Funds of Knowledge approach in education emerged in Tucson, Arizona at the end of the 1980s, spearheaded by teachers and researchers including Carlos Vélez-Ibañez, James Greenberg, Luis Moll, Norma González, Deborah Neff, Martha Floyd Tenery, Patricia Sandoval-Taylor, Cathy Amanti, Marta Civil, and others. Its purpose was to challenge and dismantle deficit thinking in education, and to foster antiracist praxis. Broadly speaking, it consists of a theory and method by which teachers recognize, legitimize, and incorporate knowledge, skills, strengths, and resources that families possess into educational and pedagogical practice, thereby establishing meaningful links between teaching and the knowledge and skills identified through visits to students’ homes. MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY 2021, VOL. 28, NO. 2, 93–96 https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2021.1930056