ABSTRACT
Building from these premises, I will argue that what later on in the chapter is referred to as the dialectical ‘Humpty Dumpty problem’ (Ollman 1998) deserves to be a relevant going concern within critical studies of practice. However, I will also argue that just as concerning should be the tendency to presume, caricature, ignore or otherwise not take seriously those very dimensions of human practice – those connected to our learning and capacity to change ourselves and our world – so central in the successes and failures of our practices, and change, over time. Thus, what follows is a rationale for and explanation of an expansive material dialectics in the study of human practice as a matter of mind-in-activity in the course of two sections. Specifically, the first section provides a discussion of dialectical philosophy that I argue is an
essential starting point for an effective theory of practice. In the second section I outline the relationship of dialectical philosophy to Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), and the notion of mind-in-activity, as exemplar expressions of what Stetsenko (2009) refers to more broadly as the Vygotskian project.
