In an editorial titled Humanity’s leading activity: survival, of the humanity of our species, the editors of Mind, Culture and Activity: An International Journal make an urgent call for scholars to address pressing issues, offering both the journal and the Cultural Praxis website as a two-gear system of dissemination.
You can download the full editorial open access here.
Hi Alfredo. I read your editorial with keen interest. I come from South Africa and currently we have (and have had for 13 years) a chronic energy crisis that sees us without electricity for up to 10 hours a day. Our grid, quite frankly, is failing. I am a psychologist located in education and I feel a real need to develop our primary school children’s capacity in science to solve our energy crisis. We have the most amazing natural resources (such as wind and constant sun) that can be harnessed to deal with this crisis but little political will to do much. I am in the process of designing a science app for schools using gamification to 1) motivate children to solve scientific problems that are of real importance in their lives and 2) develop students’ conceptual grasp of scientific concepts as they are linked to the everyday experiences they encounter. I would love to open up a discussion around the app and how best to develop our students to meet the various crises that for us, on the tip of Africa, are not theoretical, but are very real. I was telling a friend of mine in the UK that my 12 year old daughter has no concept of what a constant electricity supply is because she has never in her life had access to constant electricity. Water too, of course, is something we here cannot take for granted. Many challenges indeed!
Hi Alfredo and the rest of your team,
I am involved in the reactivation of my neighborhood association, which I see broadly as a way to build community across economic, cultural, political, and age divides. As I have walked the neighborhood, right now to simply develop a contact list, I find everyone finds the project worthwhile and is interested in talking to me. Also I have found that the project resonates with my entire network of on-going projects, with my communities of practice, and with my professional and academic background. I sense I am on the way to blending neighborhood activism (praxis) and CHAT (theory). I have read your editorial and found many points of connection with my project.
Hi Henry,
your project does indeed sound very much aligned with all we aim to encourage and provide a platform for with this site. We really need to reconsider how to act globally by acting locally, in and through local community. I wonder, can you think of ways to amplify your project through this website, somehow? Or perhaps simply to share experiences about it that can inform other communities? Why to do what you do may not be immediately apparent to everyone, so simply sharing the why may be worth; how to do it is also a big(est) question, worth sharing. Thanks for writing.