ABSTRACT
Debates about nature and culture are not only not outdated – on the contrary, they are at the center of contemporary struggles for equality and social justice that go to the very heart of how we understand ourselves and society including whether it can be changed for the better through human agency and communal action. The widely propagandized “interactionist consensus” that it is somehow both biology and culture (nature and nurture) that shape human development and its outcomes is in fact erroneous and misleading. Many positions that combat this false consensus and the nature–culture duality draw on relational ontology predicated on the mutual constitution of these processes. Vygotsky’s project lays grounds for the next, and more radical, shift beyond relational ontology. An approach termed transformative activist stance posits cultural-historical and transformative ontoepistemology at the center focusing on the relational matrix of continuing, ceaseless, and open-ended flow of transformative praxis as the process of world- and self-creation. This position takes natureculture as one unified process that people collaboratively and agentively carry out. The core effort in focusing on transformative ontoepistemology is to develop the ethics and politics of responsibility that could provide conceptual handles for collective struggles for social and environmental justice.
