The opportunity to write a rejoinder to the commentary papers by Higgins and McDonald (this issue), Murphy and Carlisle (this issue) and Ritchie (this issue) is a very welcome one. In fact, I could not have asked for more: the kind of response that these three papers collectively offer, should meet expectations of any even utmost demanding author whose work is being commented upon. Higgins and McDonald give a beautiful illustration of my paper’s practical import through showing how it has instigated their important and creative efforts at community-building among sociocultural scholars in New Zealand. Ritchie puts forth some provocative questions and asks me to elaborate on several points. In a particularly welcome move, Murphy and Carlisle, in addition to providing an excellent summary of my paper as well as directly engaging with its ideas and concepts, also go on to advance its thinking by situating the concepts of relational ontology and transformative activist stance in the context of coteaching and cogenerative dialogue. What is perhaps most remarkable is that these three papers are not only in a dialogue (and a cogenerative one at that, at least in part) with the ideas of my paper but are also as if talking to each other, engaging and highlighting points across all four papers in this forum and providing for a space that affords mutual growth and development. For example, that Higgins and McDonald show practical import of my (admittedly abstract) conceptual ideas, whereas Murphy and Carlisle address their implications and applications to the area of science education already partly answers questions raised by Ritchie (and I will further address these questions in this rejoinder too through elaborating on the quote from bell hooks taken as an epigraph).

I will begin this rejoinder by commenting on how going through the activity of participating in this forum and of engaging in dialogue with my commentators makes sense to me at several levels—most importantly, at the personal and the conceptual one—and how these two levels are actually intricately connected. I will weave my reaction to a number of points raised by my commentators into this general description pertaining to the experience of making sense of our dialogue. I will then address, in more detail, the issue of theory versus practice conundrum that has become central to my efforts at advancing Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) approach in recent years and that has been commented upon by Ritchie (who indirectly operated from what, to my mind, is quite a common view on ‘theory –practice’ link that I had encountered and dealt with many times in the past). In particular, Ritchie pointed out that my paper contained only theoretical conceptualizations and lacked a discussion of their practical ramifications; I welcome this charge because it gives me a chance to elaborate on an issue that I believe is of crucial significance to everyone engaged in theory building, practice, and research in science education and beyond.

In this rejoinder, I will make use of and refer to my earlier works in an intentional effort to introduce the set of ideas I have been working on through the years—as a context in which my target article in this forum can be better understood. In addition, because one of the arguments I want to make in this rejoinder concerns the inseparability of the personal and the conceptual, it feels right to introduce myself and my works in a way that adds a personal dimension to the discussion.

The personal and the conceptual: an exegesis on the link between emotion and cognition

On the personal level, the dialogue with my interlocutors is meaningful because it provides a sense of belonging to a community of researchers who share common interests, tackle related issues, and talk to each other to meaningfully engage with ideas for these ideas to mutually grow while elaborating and building upon each other. Sadly (and although it may come as a surprise to scholars who are just now joining the ranks of CHAT), this does not happen very often in science (for one account of this general unfortunate feature of science, see Horn 1988). This is true even in CHAT tradition, which should and could have been more dialogical if just for the sake of staying true to the major interactive gist of its own theoretical foundation in which the notions of dialogue and relations have always been at the core. In my own experience—as someone who by now, I believe it be fair to say, is a veteran in CHAT tradition (with my first papers on Vygotsky dating back to the early 1980s)—this still is an exception rather than a rule. There is a reason for this apart from the traditional ones such as occasional ideological divisions and habits of sticking to one’s own conceptual turfs (as discussed also in my target article in this forum), as well as a lack of interactive formats for discussing ideas, with the present journal breaking with this tradition in innovative and highly welcome ways. The additional reason I have in mind is that CHAT community itself is relatively new and truly young, only now coming into being (in the last mere 10–15 years, the age of adolescence indeed!), struggling to define its identity and mission, just as adolescents do, on the foundation of important, yet in many ways incomplete, work accomplished from the late 1970s through the early 1990s when Vygotsky and his school’s research were just coming to be known, analyzed and appreciated on the international scene. Here is an optimistic message then for the scholars who might have been disappointed with the observation about the lack of a dialogue in CHAT that I made at the start: Now is an exciting time for all of us and perhaps especially for a new generation of scholars to come to the scene and—through dialogue—make an important effort at consolidating and bringing together the largely disconnected, yet critically and practically important threads (given the realities of today’s policy and politics including in education) emerging from the presently existing outlines of sociocultural approach including the one offered by the recent and not-so-recent CHAT scholarship.

That the time is right and ripe for this kind of a consolidating and solidarity-building effort, with a necessary implication that such effort entails searching for common foundations and grounds, is precisely the core message in my initial paper in this forum. At the level of its deepest rationale, this paper was truly about solidarity, that is, about the need for CHAT researchers—and a wider community of those who understand culture, ideology/ethics and context as being central to development—to come together and build such a community and such a common foundation while expanding and breaking the walls of their traditionally narrow alliances and research communities. I was thrilled to see that this message has been not only grasped but also put to work—precisely in the spirit of solidarity and transformative activism—by Higgins and McDonald in their thoughtful comment.

This personal level of relating to the commentaries in this forum as just described—that is, of getting a sense of community and rejoicing at how my invitation at solidarity has been taken up and put to work in a practical way—is not separate from a conceptual level of understanding the same process. At the conceptual level, the importance of being in dialogue with one’s intellectual peers has very much to do (in addition to or rather, simultaneously with an emotional-personal sense of solidarity) with the crucially important theoretical stance on the nature of phenomena such as concepts, theories, discourses and any other products or dimensions of human activity.

This theoretical stance, in my view, has to do with ineluctable dialogicality of any and all aspects, incarnations, and expression of human development, being, and learning. This stance most clearly stems from Bakhtin’s works (among others) yet permeates also the approach taken by Vygotsky who, though almost never using the terms ‘dialogicality’ or ‘dialogue’, does convey the importance of an intricate, intimate and at the same time foundational and indispensable role of others in human development—both of immediate others and of culture and society that, in Vygotsky’s terms, always embody and represent others. In my rendering of this stance (for an early articulation, see Stetsenko 1988), any human creations and aspects of praxis including knowledge, concepts, ideas, and theories are essentially, profoundly, and ineluctably dialogical and relational. Their dialogical nature transpires and comes to the fore if these creations (phenomena) are understood as parts and parcels of ongoing real life activities out in the world (e.g., Stetsenko and Arievitch 2004a), that is, as instantiations of these activities rather than separate and independently existing, reified products of unknown (or alternatively, purely idealist and mentalist) etymology, ontology and ultimate grounding (as in the popular metaphor of the third world by Popper). This implies that knowledge (or knowing) should itself be understood as activity that cannot be achieved ‘from nowhere’ and instead implicates ourselves, therefore, being profoundly saturated with personal goals and aspirations, ethics and values (e.g., Stetsenko 2002). Moreover, all aspects of human activities only come to exist (come to be) when they are answered to and engaged with by others as well as and crucially (as I have written on a previous occasion) “made into a meaningful part of the reader’s own life and work, thus continuing that works’ (i.e., works by others) existence within the continuously unfolding and creative human pursuits in the world” (Stetsenko 2004, p. 501). That is, concepts and ideas can extend their existence—and in an important sense, can come to be—only by being comprehended and engaged with, always a-new, as well as ultimately put to work by others, in a continuing and expansive collaborative quest for knowledge and the practical pursuits associated with this quest.

This stance, in my previous works, has been conveyed through the terminology of collaboration, by drawing attention to research and science at large always being collaborative and relational (with illustration drawn from the history of Vygotsky’s project that embodied collaborative nature, in a mirror congruency, both in its theoretical position and real-life existence). It is important to note here that, for me, the notion of collaboration entails dialogicality yet goes beyond its merely discursive or narrative forms to instead extend into the realm of practical doings and activities as also being profoundly dialogical, with science itself understood as ultimately always practical, world-changing, and world-creating.

This position is most directly aimed at countering the old but powerfully persistent approach to science as being largely a solipsistic enterprise conducted in the ivory tower of individual pursuits of truth. This approach has ironically pervaded even interpretations of Vygotsky’s project (including by members of this very project, as discussed in Stetsenko 2003) that largely followed the old-fashioned “Great Man” version of interpreting history of science (e.g., Stetsenko and Arievitch 2004a). In these outdated interpretations, Vygotsky’s project has been effectively taken out of its sociocultural context, ubiquitous political commitment, strong practical orientation, and remarkably collaborative history (including unfortunate exclusion of contributions made by many female scholars to the ideas purportedly created by Vygotsky “single-handedly”). This position has also to do with my broader conceptualization of human subjectivity (e.g., Stetsenko 2005, and the original paper in this forum)—as always stemming from, participating in and contributing to the larger sociocultural and socio-political, as well as ultimately practical (this-worldly), collaborative pursuits and struggles in the real life contexts. This stance on the broadly conceived dialogicality of human subjectivity is itself in dialogue with points about solidarity and the importance of others in the very being of humans recently highlighted by Roth (2007b) in a paper which I had a chance to comment on as a participant in another forum in this journal where I highlighted ethical/ideological dimensions of dialogicality (in light of a unique Bakhtinian term ‘postuplenie,’ see Stetsenko 2007).

To summarize the points made so far. Being in dialogue with others is simultaneously (a) a personally rewarding experience (perhaps especially so in the academic quarters that too often are not explicitly dialogical), tapping into what is arguably the most fundamental human need—the need to belong and to share, and (b) a condition sin qua non for the approaches, concepts, and ideas we struggle to develop to ultimately come to life and find their existence. This two-fold conclusion might be taken as an illustration of why personal/emotional and cognitive/conceptual are really facets of one and the same process of human becoming—an important topic that has recently come to the fore in the CHAT (e.g., Roth 2007a) scholarship and to which I will return later on.

Cogenerative dialogue in scholarship: when does it work?

This conclusion also forms a suitable context to express my reaction to the commentary paper by Murphy and Carlisle. Their paper embodies the dialogical nature of scholarly work in a most beautiful way as they creatively expand and build on the notion of contribution offered in my paper, moving this idea to the new level where the collaborative dimension of contribution is revealed and ascertained to a greater extent than in my original paper. This kind of expansion is particularly and deeply satisfying to me because it follows well with the theme of collaboration that, though left aside in the target paper (due to its focus on restoring the too often neglected individual dimension of collaborative practices and activity), is centrally important to my overall research orientation as discussed in the previous paragraphs. The way of dealing with ideas of others exemplified in the comment by Murphy and Carlisle appears so exciting and appealing to me because it allows to bring forth and move forward the meaning of these ideas (including those meanings that remained merely tacit, potential, or underdeveloped) like no other approach could ever do. Namely, this is achieved not by reiterating ideas and concepts but by acting on their potentialities and thus bringing these ideas to life in a continuous cycle of collaborative and never-ending pursuits. In their truly dialogical and cogenerative move, Murphy and Carlisle acted on the potentialities of my ideas in a creative—and generous—way. As they state, for example, the relational ontology of learning is borne out by coteaching where expanded learning opportunities come not from any solitary process but through the effects of interaction and the experience of being-together-with (the latter concept derived, as the authors indicate, from Roth and Tobin 2001). As Murphy and Carlisle show, there are useful ways how coteaching develops the notion of contribution into shared contribution—with added important and welcome emphasis on expanded agency for all contributors, the sharing of learning and teaching through dialogue, and the active promotion of collaborative agency (of coteachers and students). I welcome this expansion as being extremely useful, fruitful and promising, and I look forward to continue working on these expanded ideas, hopefully collaboratively (if even not through immediate contacts, but perhaps in some shared space where our research agendas overlap and complement each other) to further explore their mutual potentialities and points of growth. What a joy it was to read this comment—with my emotional reaction really having to do profoundly with the sense of conceptually—and collaboratively—moving ahead.

Reading the commentary paper by Murphy and Carlisle also served as an impetus for me to better acquaint myself with the studies on cogenerative teaching. I can clearly see now how ideas of collaborative nature of human subjectivity (including scholarly pursuits, concepts, and theories) that I have been developing using examples of Vygotsky’s project and its history and the notion of contribution as central to development can be now brought together with the studies on cogenerative teaching and their theoretical underpinnings. Participation in this forum, therefore, for me proves to be more than a welcome opportunity to discuss ideas but represents a welcoming gateway into a new area of research where I expect to find many synergies, opportunities for growth and points of mutual enrichment.

This sense of cogenerative dialogue—a willingness to open up to ideas of the other and to engage with these ideas in the interest of mutual growth and common pursuit of understanding—did not come through for me in the commentary by Ritchie as strongly as it did in the paper by Murphy and Carlisle. Probably (and this could be discussed as a theoretical concept), in some situations, the other can turn out to be, or at least can turn out to be perceived, as too dissimilar from oneself, too ‘other-y’ (too foreign, almost alien) to produce a desire to engage with in a dialogue and meaningful exchange. What makes a distance between oneself and the other too wide (at least in perception) for it to be bridged or at least for those engaged in interaction to want to bridge it? Interesting questions to explore, I do not claim to know the answer and can only guess that this answer lies at the intersection of the personal and the conceptual (emotional and cognitive) as do all aspects of human endeavors, engagements, and interactions.

Ritchie begins by saying that my “strategy of restoring and expanding Vygotsky’s transformative activist stance to human development by emphasizing the notion of collaborative purposeful transformation of the world [is] a task embraced already by scholars who are actively engaged in the transformation of 3rd generation cultural-historical activity theory (e.g., Roth and Lee 2007).” Because Ritchie did not elaborate on his point in any detail, and the meaning of this comment appeared ambiguous to me, I took the time to re-read the paper by Roth and Lee. In this most helpful and informative paper, Roth and Lee indeed mention transformation on several occasions, for example, when they state that “human beings plan and change the material world and societal life just as these settings mutually transform agents and the nature of their interactions with each other” (p. 198). In another example, they also state that “tools undergo continuous transformation during instruction” (p. 202) and point out “continual transformation of culture” each time language forms are realized in new ways (p. 209). These are all important points, also made in prior works in various traditions (as Roth and Lee clearly indicate via appropriately referencing these works). However, Roth and Lee do not employ the notion of “collaborative purposeful transformation of the world” (not once mentioning the notion ‘purposeful’ and only in passing that of ‘collaborative’), nor do they discuss whether this is the ultimate ontological grounding for human development and learning (the central point of my paper), nor explore whether this can be taken as a central stance of Vygotsky’s original project that went lost in the later CHAT developments (another core argument made in my paper). Certainly, all of this is mentioned here absolutely not to critique Roth and Lee—their paper engaged other important issues and had other core points to make (which were many, though discussing them would understandably go beyond the scope of the present rejoinder). I am only pointing this out (in a nit-picking exercise of following through with the usage of particular notions) to simply answer to a charge made by Ritchie who referred to the task I had undertaken in my initial paper as having been already embraced before and—I sense—who chose this as a ground to not engage with my ideas in an expansive, dialogical way.

The puzzle of Ritchie’s remark in the first paragraph of his paper (which to a large degree did set the stage for the rest of it) can perhaps be resolved if I move away from the most immediately conveyed meaning and make a guess that Ritchie possibly referred to Roth and Lee (2007) and other scholars endeavoring to transform CHAT rather than addressing the role of collaborative transformation in human development and learning as I have done. If this is a correct disambiguation of Ritchie’s meaning, then we are leaving the contents of my paper and step into a different discussion that has little to do with it. No doubt, I am highly sympathetic with the critical stance on CHAT and the need to transform it, as I have written on various occasions, as for example, in my early paper that highlighted the need to critique CHAT from ‘inside’ this approach (Stetsenko 1995/1990) and later, when setting the stage for further critical reappraisal of CHAT (Stetsenko 2005, p. 71):

An attempt to move beyond the canonical version of activity theory will be undertaken not only because this theory is not a fully-fledged conception without its own internal contradictions, unresolved tensions, and substantive gaps… but also out of a conviction that the critical stance represents an important methodology that allows us to make sense of any theory. Namely, this critical methodology is consistent with the very spirit of activity theory that postulates the centrality of transformative and creative—and thus also necessarily critical—activity as a methodological tool for meaningfully dealing with any aspect of the world, including the activity of theoretical understanding (emphasis added).

However, to reiterate, although I (along with many others) am truly sympathetic to the goal of transforming CHAT, this was not the concept of transformation that my original paper implied. Nor was the notion of transformation per se something that I could or did claim an authorship to. Therefore, when Ritchie discusses examples of transformation in a study where it was shown that a first-year teacher and his supervisor/mentor influenced each other (indeed an example of transformation), this discussion, albeit no doubt interesting, bears no immediate relevance to my paper. This pertains to Ritchie’s example of another, and also interesting, study in which emotions were shown to be linked to identities (Roth 2007a).

Here is one important clarification then prompted by Ritchie (for which I am thankful) concerning the notion of transformation. To emphasize again, I certainly cannot and in fact never did claim any authorship to this notion per se nor to the argument concerning its pertinence to teaching and learning. Transformation is a very general term that has been widely—and successfully—used in scholarship in both education and psychology, for example in Freirian critical pedagogy (to which I refer in my paper) and in other versions of progressive, liberatory education, for example, when addressing interactions between educators and students that foster the collaborative creation of power. This term also has been used in recent CHAT scholarship, for example, in Engestrom and his colleagues’ works as already titles of some of these works indicate (e.g., Engeström, Virkkunen, Helle, Pihlaja, and Poikela 1996). This notion is also familiar to scholars who have read Marx—this is where this notion’s roots, in my utilization of it, really belong—and, for example, came across his famous statement about the importance of changing the world in order to understand it.

However, I employed the notion of collaborative purposeful transformation not simply in order to make a point about the effects of transformation per se (as in mutually changing effects of participants in a dialogue or in a teaching-learning process) but rather, in a much more specific (and more general, at the same time) way. In particular, I argued that ‘collaborative purposeful transformation’ (the term that, as I have checked right now on ‘google’ does not seem to have been used in prior works at all) can be taken as the ultimate ontological grounding for human development and learning, as the ultimate reality that supersedes (or supplants, in a dialectical sense of the term) the realties of relations and interactions (all the important insights of relational ontology notwithstanding). I argued that it is through changing the world and attempting to contribute to societal collaborative praxis—rather than merely along with these processes or in addition to them—that humans come to be and come to know their world and themselves. A large part of my original paper was devoted to showing why this understanding makes sense and how it can help to re-conceptualize the gist of human development and learning. In other words, I employed this notion (following in the footsteps of Vygotsky’s project) to move in the direction of charting a novel understanding of the processes that form the very core of development and learning, including discussing how this understanding opens up ways to conceptualize individual aspects, or dimensions, of collaborative practices (where the notion of contribution came to the fore).

This is not a place to recount all the points made in my paper. They have been made and are out there awaiting a cogenerative understanding. Having said that, I admit that my paper undertook a very ambitious goal and that this broad ambition—to address some truly foundational issues—can be challenging and perhaps even confusing especially because I did not have enough space to address various arguments in great detail and instead endeavored to paint a broad encompassing picture that certainly needs further elaboration. And yes, this kind of theorizing does go against the Zeitgeist of today where ‘empirical evidence’ and ‘evidence-based practice’ are the terms most in vogue. But are broad conceptualizations in and of themselves really un-practical? This is what I want to discuss in a concluding part of this paper. But before doing so, I will briefly attend, in the next section, to the particular questions posed by Ritchie.

CHAT and identity

Ritchie asked me to elaborate on three questions—all concerning the implications of taking the transformative activist stance for the issue of teacher identity. I appreciate these questions and also Ritchie’s apparent willingness to potentially contribute to the transformative activist stance that has transpired in the concluding paragraphs of his commentary.

The issue of how identity—or the self (the two terms being often used in the literature interchangeably)—can be re-conceptualized from a CHAT perspective has been addressed in my (co-authored) paper titled “The Self in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory” (Stetsenko and Arievitch 2004b). In this paper, we offered an expansion of CHAT principles to include conceptualization of human subjectivity (including the self and identity) and suggested that this approach allows to avoid the extremes of both (a) the mentalist views that limit the self to individual mental constructs and (b) the relational approaches that fuse the self with the context and relatively disregard individual agency. We gave a detailed presentation of how the identity has been conceptualized in relational perspectives (where ‘in-between-uity’ is central) and discuss both advantages and disadvantages of these perspectives. In particular, we pointed out that a number of recently influential theories (such as social constructionism and theories of participatory learning, e.g., Lave and Wenger 1991) essentially focus on the dynamics of social transactions (i.e., discourse or dynamics of participation in communities) as the ultimate and only explanatory level of analysis and avoid articulating the role and purpose of human subjectivity (including the self) in producing this reality, ultimately presenting the self as ephemeral and relatively powerless artifact of social processes.

As an alternative (building on the strengths of relational approaches yet going beyond their exclusive emphasis on transactional reality), we offered a notion of the self as a leading activity. This conceptualization upholds the insight of transactional approaches in that it posits the self to represent a moment in ongoing social activities that is not “stored” in the depths of a human soul or brain, but is constantly re-enacted and constructed by individuals anew in the ever-shifting activities. Unlike the transactional approaches, however, we argued that the self is grounded in collaborative transformative practices and is immanent in activities that position individuals to contribute to these practices, that is, to meaningfully changing the world. The following quote conveys the gist of our conceptualization:

Understanding that people always contribute to social practices, rather than merely participate in or sustain them, places activities that allow individuals to purposefully transform the world at the very core of the self. That is, the self appears as made up of real-life processes and as oriented toward real-life practical tasks and pursuits of changing something in and about the world (including in oneself as part of the world). In other words, the self appears as an activity and instrument of transforming the world, as an instrument of social change. …That is, this notion conveys that social productive activities in the world are not reifications of the self but the ‘real work’ in which the self is born, constructed and enacted. Therefore, to conceptualize the self as a leading activity is to emphasize that it is constituted by the ways in which we ‘do’ and perform, rather than have, a self, and, moreover, by what we do about the world (thus transcending ourselves), as we engage in activities that contribute to changing something in and about the world. In this sense, the self can be also described as an embodiment of a meaningful life project … (Stetsenko and Arievitch 2004b, p. 494).

It would take some additional space (not available in this rejoinder) to elaborate on how this conceptualization bears on the teachers’ identity in particular. An overall direction, however, has been suggested in my target paper in this forum. Namely, I argued (see Table 1 in my target paper) for the role of teachers to be radically re-thought—moving away from seeing them as transmitters of information or mere facilitators in dialogues toward seeing teachers as activists open to collaboration and dialogue, that is, as agents of a collaborative change out in the world of social practices. This radical view posits teachers as active and committed contributors to broad practices of social change (in and outside of schools) who cannot and should not shy away from expressing their views, commitments and agendas (though always remaining open to negotiation and amenable to change). This approach provides, in the long run, a new orientation for educating teachers around the issue of civic leadership and political (non-dogmatic, open to dialogue) activism.

In addition, I can communicate with much joy that a number of researchers have already applied the notion of self as a leading activity (derived from Stetsenko and Arievitch 2004b) to precisely the topics of identity in learning. For example, in a paper aptly titled “Imagined futures: mediation of the mathematical biography,” Black, Williams, Hernandez-Martinez, Davis, Wake, and Pampaka (2007, Internet) report how ‘imagined identity’ of the future, formed in line with the leading activity, appears significant in the learner’s development in studying mathematics. A number of papers in a special issue of the International Journal of Educational Research devoted to cultural-historical activity theory implementation in the field of learning and development, report on other applications of this and related notions to learning in classrooms (e.g., Williams et al. 2007). In another important work, Edwards (2005) makes use of the dialectics of activity systems developed in my prior work (now further extended in the target paper in this forum) to argue for relational agency in learning and teaching. My (in collaboration with my colleagues) interpretation of educational aspects of CHAT associated with transformative activist stance can be also found in Vianna and Stetsenko (2006) where we emphasize the dialectical interplay between history and agency in learning and in Arievitch and Stetsenko (2000) and Stetsenko and Arievitch (2002) where teaching-and-learning are highlighted to be dependent on cultural tools that embody past practices but that need to be each time re-enacted by learners a-new.

There are direct, concrete, and tangible ways to further expand the transformative activist stance to conceptualizing and empirically studying teacher identity and other aspects of teaching and learning. As I mentioned earlier in this rejoinder, combining this stance with ideas and practices developed in the cogenerative teaching approach by Tobin and Roth is, in my view, one viable way to pursue this topic. I invite Ritchie to a collaboration on this topic and look forward to a cogenerative dialogue that, if it happens, will, no doubt, have practical implications. After all, there is nothing more practical than a theory, as the famous Lewin’s expression goes, and this is the topic for my concluding section.

Theory and practice: time for an understanding that closes the gaps between the two realms

That theory and practice are not two separate endeavors and that instead they need to be seen as closely intertwined has been a common theme discussed across various disciplines and approaches. However, the deeply seated assumption about mind and action, words and deeds, theory and practice as existing separately and independently from each other, persists. The persistence of this viewpoint has to do with the notion that knowledge is a purely ‘mental’ phenomenon contained in and confined to a separate realm divorced from the tangible and material, ‘messy’ processes in the world associated with doing things rather than thinking about them or getting to understand them. In the classical worldview that is still permeating sciences, knowledge is defined as the inner depiction of an outer, mind-independent reality and phenomena—a depiction that has little to do with practical (i.e., tangible and material) actions in and on the world.

Given the persistence of this view, it is not surprising that theory is looked at as something different than practical or empirical work and even as unworthy unless its practical implications are indicated. The irony is that the social sciences on this score fall, and not for the first time, behind the natural sciences where it is very well understood that it is precisely the conceptual schemes of very high generality that can turn a discipline into an ‘adequate science’ (cf. Lewontin 2003).

An alternative view in which ideas and actions, words and deeds are viewed as truly not separate has been slowly, and unevenly, gaining momentum in social sciences. A plethora of new approaches in history of psychology championed by Danziger (e.g., 1990), science studies (e.g., Knorr-Cetina 1999) and feminist epistemologies (e.g., Narayan and Harding 2000) has begun to assert (against much resistance from mainstream cognitivist sciences in what has been termed ‘the science wars’) that theories and knowledge arise from the practices of scientific communities saturated with social relationships between researchers and their wider social context. What is highlighted in these approaches is the reciprocal link between humans’ involvement in the making of scientific knowledge, including theory, and the sciences’ involvement in the making of human life and history. As Jill Morawski (2001, p. 434) puts it, “largely unrecognized by most practicing scientists is that theory is not universally a fixed term but a historically contingent practice. …Theory and practice can be more commodius yet still distinct phenomena.”

My own efforts have been focused on showing that theory needs to be understood as originating from wide social practices imbued with ideology and politics and, simultaneously, as transformative of these practices (e.g., Stetsenko 2004). The argument throughout has been that if collaborative practices/activities are posited as being at the core of human development (thus also as being the very ‘matter’ of which ideas and concepts are made) then knowing and acting, words and deeds, theory and practice cannot be ever thought of as two separate realms; instead they inevitably and necessarily appear as belonging together and as forming inherent aspects (or dimensions) of one and the same process of people collaboratively engaging with and transforming the world (see Stetsenko and Arievitch 2004a).

In my elaboration of this view, knowledge (including its theoretical forms) does not merely reflect the world. Instead, knowledge embodies past practices, at a given point in history and in a given sociocultural context, to only momentarily reflect these past practices through the lenses of future goals in what essentially are continuously expanding and unbroken cycles of ‘practice-theory-practice’ (see Stetsenko and Vianna, in press). In this sense, thought and knowledge (including theory and concepts) entail action from which they spring and for which sake they exist. Thought and knowledge therefore appear as practical acts in the world because they always come out of active transformative practices and always return into them, serving as but a step in carrying out these practices and having their grounding, their mode of existence, and their ultimate relevance within these broader transformative practices. The famous Lewin’s expression about theory being practical can and needs to be expanded with the notion that there is nothing more theoretical than a good practice (Stetsenko 2004, p. 511).

This viewpoint on the nature of theory and knowledge is consistent with and continues Vygotsky’s central metaphor about the word itself being a deed (Vygotsky 2004) that he formulated in his very last work, as his testament. The important implication from the position outlined herein is that in order to understand theory it is important to go to its roots—into the always morally, ethically, and politically imbued as well as ultimately practical reality behind theory. In this sense, for example, seeing that Vygotsky’s project was situated in and motivated by the revolutionary project of his time—the project of building a new society based on principles of equality and social justice—is indispensible to the understanding of this project.

One more step can be offered here to expand this position. To understand theory and to see what the theory does or can potentially do, one needs to see it as a personal document saturated with goals, motives, aspirations, and commitments of its creators. To return to bell hook’s penetrating observation taken as an epigraph to this paper: “Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end” (2003, p. 37). bell hooks also says, in the same spirit and with an amazing insight, that theory comes from pain, when she writes:

I came to theory because I was hurting – the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend – to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing (hooks 2003, p. 36).

I take these words to be an ultimate and beautiful expression of the argument that emotions and cognition, the personal and the conceptual always exist together. I take these words also to mean that theory always comes from its author’s personal struggle and passionate preoccupation with some ‘lived’ reality, that is, with some worldly matter filled with moral dilemmas, emotional engagements, and ethical concerns—all belonging together in what can be termed personal predicament—that a given theory is called upon to address. It is the quality of this predicament and its connection to particular social projects that saturates theory and turns it either into a liberatory and healing creation or, alternatively, into sometimes a stifling and dead-ended (or hegemonic) set of words. This view of the theory as a stepping stone in worldly personal predicaments that always go beyond just individual dimensions and into meaningful social matters (if we remember to dismantle the rift between the individual and the social too) has many important implications. For one, this view suggests the ways to close the gap not only between emotion and cognition, but also between theory and practice and, moreover, indicates that these two gaps need to be closed together, at once. I would like to end this rejoinder with another quote from bell hooks who referred to feminist theory and practice but whose words, I think, apply to any area of today’s struggles for social justice and equality and the role that theory can play in them:

Catharine MacKinnon reminds us that “we know things with our lives and we live that knowledge, beyond what any theory has yet theorized.” Making this theory is the challenge before us. For in its production lies the hope of our libration, in its production lies the possibility of naming all our pain – of making all our hurt go away. If we create feminist theory, feminist movement that address this pain, we will have no difficulty building a mass-based feminist resistance struggle. There will be no gap between feminist theory and feminist practice (hooks 2003, p. 41).