Critical Perspectives on Activity: Explorations Across Education, Work, and Everyday Life

The last two decades have seen an international explosion of interest in theories of mind, culture, and activity. This book includes a diverse array of theoretical perspectives from international scholars in the fields of education, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, communications, industrial relations, and business studies. Broken into three main sections (education, work, and everyday life) each chapter emerges from an analysis of practice and learning as social cultural participation and historical change in relation to the concept of activity, contradiction, and struggle.

Peter H. Sawchuk is Professor of Sociology & Equity Studies in Education as well as Industrial Relations at University of Toronto. He is the Chair of the International Advisory Committee for the Conference on Researching Work and Learning. He is also a founding member of the University of Toronto's Centre for the Study of Education and Work.

Newton Duarte is a full professor in Philosophy of Education at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in Brazil where he is the Director of the PhD Program in School Education. He holds large-scale grants from the Brazilian National Governmental Institution for Scientific and Technologic Development and has won post-Professorial honors at UNESP.

Mohamed Elhammoumi is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, College of Social Sciences at the Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Saudi Arabia. He has published numerous papers on child development, cultural psychology, and the role of culture and family structures on the development of mental abilities, proportional reasoning and cognitive development including “Socio-Historicocultural Psychology: Lev Semenovich Vygotsky: A Bibliographical Notes”.