Pre-Conference

Purpose and focus
The pre-conference offers an introductory and orienting space for participants who are new to Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), including practitioners, doctoral candidates, early-career researchers and other scholars new to this perspective. Participants with more experience in CHAT are welcome to join us too to share their knowledge and experience.

The aim of the pre-conference is to build community and create a shared conceptual and experiential foundation that enables participants to engage more confidently and meaningfully with the discussions of the main conference.

Content
The pre-conference introduces CHAT as a dialectical approach to development and human activity, emphasizing historical change, contradictions, and relational processes. Key topics include:

  • Development as historically situated, relational, and contradictory
  • Meanings, identities, and roles as socially and temporally constructed
  • Intersubjectivity as a foundational concept in CHAT

Participants will also be introduced to the four generations of CHAT, focusing on how the theory has evolved and what this enables for research and practice. In addition, Change Laboratories are presented as an example of CHAT-informed, interventionist research, highlighting concepts such as contradictions, transformative agency, double stimulation, and expansive learning.

Format and link to the main conference
In the two hours of the pre-conference, key concepts in CHAT will be introduced through interactive lectures. We will save the last hour of the pre-conference for intervision: participants are welcome to bring any concerns, worries or doubts they may have related to their work to the pre-conference. We will provide space to discuss these concerns, worries or doubts with peers and aim to include some experts in the field for this part of the pre-conference too.

The pre-conference is designed to support deeper engagement with the main conference’s focus on temporality, intersubjectivity, development, acceleration, and resonance in contemporary activity systems.