Introduction

In this age of humanitarian and ecological crises, it has become increasingly necessary to ensure that educational research and practices are actively engaged in collective initiatives to reconstruct the common good in an equitable and sustainable way, going beyond privatization and commoditization of education and other institutions. This chapter discusses how activity theory can create new, engaged educational research toward emancipatory social science. The new form of educational research based on activity theory is focused on collaborative interventions in people’s practices of human learning and formation that emancipate their potential as they transform the socio-historical world. In this chapter, the concept of activity, a basic category of activity theory, is applied to characterize new forms of pedagogy and educational research based on the conceptual and methodological framework of activity theory. Additionally, the cornerstone of activity theory is seen from the perspective of the ethos of emancipating human potential and expanding the subjects’ agency to make a positive difference in their own life-worlds.