Moving beyond the Relational Worldview: Exploring the Next Steps Premised on Agency and a Commitment to Social Change

Stetsenko comments on Saeed Karimi-Aghdam's paper, which serves to invigorate debates about theoretical and, more broadly, philosophical underpinnings of the contemporary approaches to human development, with crucial implications for applied fields including education. Such debates are sorely needed today as psychology continues to vacillate between the extremes of biologically deterministic views that reduce human development to processes inside the organism on the one hand and those views that focus on development as a process that is distributed in and shaped by sociocultural forces without due attention to individual dynamics such as the development of the mind, self-regulation, motivation, and the self on the other. This contribution is especially timely because it allows for more centrally positioning Vygotsky's legacy within contemporary discussions that do engage with philosophical and metatheoretical matters in thus taking exception from the programmatic atheoreticism and rote positivism in much of mainstream psychology.