In recent times there has been recognition of the growing influence of cultural theory on historical writing. Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler and Spivak are just some of the thinkers whose ideas have been taken up and deployed by historians. What are these ideas and where do they come from? How have cultural theorists thought about 'history'? And how have historians applied theoretical insights to enhance their own understanding of events in the past? This book provides a wide-ranging and authoritative guide to the often vexed and controversial relationship between history and contemporary theory. It analyses the concepts that concern both theorists and historians, such as power, identity, modernity and postcolonialism, and offers a critical evaluation of them from an historical standpoint. Written in an accessible manner, History and Cultural Theory gives historians and students an invaluable summary of the impact of cultural theory on historiography over the last twenty years, and indicates the likely directions of the subject in the future.

This book is an exploration of science in the making. It offers readers the opportunity to critically reflect on the process of development of Vygotsky's research program from the perspective of dialectics, focusing on the dramatic process of building and rebuilding cultural historical theory. Vygotsky's creative and dramatic journey is no less important than the concrete results of his research. An epistemological and historical investigation of the formulation of cultural historical theory sheds light on the process of knowledge production and reveals hidden dimensions of creativity in science.

The field of cultural-historical psychology originated in the work of Lev Vygotsky and the Vygotsky Circle in the Soviet Union more than eighty years ago, and has now established a powerful research tradition in Russia and the West. The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology is the first volume to systematically present cultural-historical psychology as an integrative/holistic developmental science of mind, brain, and culture. Its main focus is the inseparable unity of the historically evolving human mind, brain, and culture, and the ways to understand it. The contributors are major international experts in the field, and include authors of major works on Lev Vygotsky, direct collaborators and associates of Alexander Luria, and renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks. The Handbook will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of psychology, education, humanities and neuroscience.

Over the past century, educational psychologists and researchers have posited many theories to explain how individuals learn, i.e. how they acquire, organize and deploy knowledge and skills. The 20th century can be considered the century of psychology on learning and related fields of interest (such as motivation, cognition, metacognition etc.) and it is fascinating to see the various mainstreams of learning, remembered and forgotten over the 20th century and note that basic assumptions of early theories survived several paradigm shifts of psychology and epistemology. Beyond folk psychology and its naïve theories of learning, psychological learning theories can be grouped into some basic categories, such as behaviorist learning theories, connectionist learning theories, cognitive learning theories, constructivist learning theories, and social learning theories. Learning theories are not limited to psychology and related fields of interest but rather we can find the topic of learning in various disciplines, such as philosophy and epistemology, education, information science, biology, and – as a result of the emergence of computer technologies – especially also in the field of computer sciences and artificial intelligence. As a consequence, machine learning struck a chord in the 1980s and became an important field of the learning sciences in general. As the learning sciences became more specialized and complex, the various fields of interest were widely spread and separated from each other; as a consequence, even presently, there is no comprehensive overview of the sciences of learning or the central theoretical concepts and vocabulary on which researchers rely. The Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning provides an up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the specific terms mostly used in the sciences of learning and its related fields, including relevant areas of instruction, pedagogy, cognitive sciences, and especially machine learning and knowledge engineering. This modern compendium will be an indispensable source of information for scientists, educators, engineers, and technical staff active in all fields of learning. More specifically, the Encyclopedia provides fast access to the most relevant theoretical terms provides up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the most important theories within the various fields of the learning sciences and adjacent sciences and communication technologies; supplies clear and precise explanations of the theoretical terms, cross-references to related entries and up-to-date references to important research and publications. The Encyclopedia also contains biographical entries of individuals who have substantially contributed to the sciences of learning; the entries are written by a distinguished panel of researchers in the various fields of the learning sciences.

Applying Cultural Historical Activity Theory in Educational Settings harnesses research and development for educational improvement, bridging the gap between research and practice. Exploring how collaborations between researchers and practitioners can be used to co-construct solutions to real-world problems, this book considers key concepts in cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), including models as resources that can be used to build and facilitate collaboration between researchers and practitioners. The chapters of the book draw on research findings from the practices of learning communities in diverse educational settings: teacher education, the education of school leaders, early childhood education and driving teacher education. Applying Cultural Historical Activity Theory in Educational Settings is an excellent resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to construct new knowledge and develop practice, or wishing to expand their knowledge of CHAT.

This collection of papers examines key ideas in cultural-historical approaches to children’s learning and development and the cultural and institutional conditions in which they occur. The collection is given coherence by a focus on the intellectual contributions made by Professor Mariane Hedegaard to understandings of children’s learning through the prism of the interplay of society, institution and person. She has significantly shaped the field through her scholarly consideration of foundational concepts and her creative attention to the fields of activity she studies. The book brings together examples of how these concepts have been employed and developed in a study of learning and development. The collection allows the contributing scholars to reveal their reactions to Hedegaard’s contributions in discussions of their own work in the field of children’s learning and the conditions in which it occurs.

Through the use of new analytical tools, this book presents a dynamic, sociocultural view of behavioural regulation in learning contexts.

A Cultural History of Underdevelopment explores the changing place of Latin America in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent U.S.-Cuba détente. In doing so, it uncovers the complex ways in which Americans have imagined the global geography of poverty and progress, as the hemispheric imperialism of the nineteenth century yielded to the Cold War discourse of "underdevelopment." John Patrick Leary examines representations of uneven development in Latin America across a variety of genres and media, from canonical fiction and poetry to cinema, photography, journalism, popular song, travel narratives, and development theory. For the United States, Latin America has figured variously as good neighbor and insurgent threat, as its possible future and a remnant of its past. By illuminating the conventional ways in which Americans have imagined their place in the hemisphere, the author shows how the popular image of the United States as a modern, exceptional nation has been produced by a century of encounters that travelers, writers, radicals, filmmakers, and others have had with Latin America. Drawing on authors such as James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, Leary argues that Latin America has figured in U.S. culture not just as an exotic "other" but as the familiar reflection of the United States’ own regional, racial, class, and political inequalities.

This book considers cultural psychology from historical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, building an understanding of cultural psychology as a human science and moving beyond the nature-culture dichotomy. The unique collection of chapters seeks to advance the field of cultural psychology by reviving its historical legacies and arguing for its social responsibility in future historical developments. It considers European legacies for cultural psychology as developed by leading figures such as Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Wundt, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Ernst Cassirer in order to provide insights into a long tradition of thinking from a cultural psychology perspective. The book discusses historical pathways in the rise and repression of cultural psychology and its different historical forms, arguing for the necessity of decolonizing psychology, securing a place for culture in it, and developing an epistemology suited to humankind’s meaning-making processes in mutual shaping of psyche and culture. It provides an integrative and historical understanding of the subject and uses the diversity and heterogeneity within the field to offer critical reflections on its achievements. The thoroughly international group of contributors brings diverse analyses of self, body, emotions, culture, and society and considers the future of cultural psychology. The volume is a stimulating read for scholars and students of cultural and theoretical psychology and related areas including philosophy, anthropology, and history.

This elegantly written and illuminating book explores the attenuated relationship between history and cultural studies, reappraising some of the issues and positions which have led to the impasse between them and highlighting the contribution to be made by a new engagement between cultural and historical theory. Focusing on the contested concept of 'experience' as a central part of his argument, Pickering advances new ways of attending to the myriad voices of everyday cultures, past and present.