Critical perspectives on activity : explorations across education, work, and everyday life / edited by Peter H. Sawchuk, Newton Duarte, Mohamed Elhammoumi.

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Introduction : Exploring activity across education, work, and everyday life / Peter H. Sawchuk, Newton Duarte, and Mohamed Elhammoumi -- Is there a Marxist psychology? / Mohamed Elhammoumi -- The cultural-historical activity theory : some aspects of development / Joachim Lompscher -- Epistemological scepticism, complacent irony : investigations concerning the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty / Maria Célia Marcondes de Moraes -- The importance of play in pre-school education : naturalisation versus a Marxist analysis / Alessandra Arce -- Estranged labor learning / Ray McDermott and Jean Lave -- "Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions" : a CHAT analysis of College Teachers / Helena Worthen and Joe Berry -- Contradictory class relations in work and learning : some resources for hope / D.W. Livingstone -- From labor process to activity theory / Paul S. Adler -- Values, rubbish, and workplace learning / Yrjö Engeström -- Education as mediation between the individual's everyday life and the historical construction of society and culture by humankind / Newton Duarte -- Activity and power : everyday life and development of working-class groups / Peter H. Sawchuk.

The last two decades have seen an international explosion of interest in theories of mind, culture, and activity. This unique collection is the first to explicitly reach back to the tradition's original critical impulse within which the writings of Karl Marx played such a central role. Each author pushes this impulse further to address leading contemporary questions. It includes a diverse array of international scholars working from 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 builds from an analysis of practice and learning as social cultural participation and historical change in relation to the concept of activity, contradiction, and struggle. This book offers insight into an important complex of overlapping practices and institutions to shed light on broader debates over such matters as the 'knowledge economy' and 'lifelong learning'.