The Challenge of Individuality in Cultural- Historical Activity Theory: “Collectividual” Dialectics from a Transformative Activist Stance

In addressing the persistent challenge of fully integrating individual dimensions and humansubjectivity within the cultural-historical activity theory, this paper suggests several steps to reviseits core onto-epistemology in an expansive approach termed the transformative activist stance.This approach outlines the subtle dialectics of individual and collective planes of human praxiswhereby each individual is shaped by collective history and collaborative practices while at thesame time shaping and real-izing them through contributing to their collective, dynamicmateriality in moving beyond the status quo. In capitalizing on people always transcending whatexists in ‘the here and now,’ in a non-adaptive fashion, based in a commitment and vision to howthe world “ought to be,” the individual subjectivity is reclaimed as itself a fully social, embodied,material-discursive process. Individual subjectivity and agency gain status through contributing tochanges in “collectividual” practices as the primary onto-epistemology of a unitary realm that isindividual and social/collective at the same time