Human Arenas

https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-022-00289-4

ARENA OF CRISIS

Discussing the Concept of Crisis in Cultural‑historical Activity

Research: a Dialectical Perspective

Manolis Dafermos1

Received: 15 December 2021 / Revised: 14 April 2022 / Accepted: 16 April 2022

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

Abstract
The concept of crisis has a long history across disciplines (medicine, history, political econ-
omy, political science, sociology, psychology, history, philosophy of science, etc.). This con-
cept has been used in a variety of different ways. Vygotsky employed the concept of crisis in
a critique of psychology as a ‘problematic discipline’. Additionally, Vygotsky used the con-
cept of crisis to refer to the specific mechanisms related to psychological development. More
generally, the concept of crisis is crucial for the conceptualisation of the process of develop-
ment of Vygotsky’s project. From a dialectical perspective, a crisis is a critical moment of a
dynamic, contradictory, developmental process. The elaboration of the concept of crisis as a
part of a broader, dialectical vision of society in the long-term process of its historical devel-
opment can become a moment of regenerating cultural-historical activity research.

Keywords Crisis · Cultural-historical · Activity research · Dialectics · Human

development · Contradiction · Practice

Introduction

‘Cultural-historical activity research in crisis contexts’ was chosen as the topic of the 6th Inter-
national ISCAR Congress in Natal.1 More generally, various aspects of the current global cri-
sis are being discussed widely from the perspective of various disciplines such as economics,
sociology and psychology. (Begley et al., 2016; Centeno & Cohen, 2010; Robinson, 2014;
Strasser & Dege, 2021; Dege & Strasser, 2021). The meaning and consequences of the cri-
sis have been the topic of intense discussions, not only in the academic community, but also
in social media, political forums and everyday life. People in various parts of the globe in

1
This paper is based on a keynote address given in 2021 ʻThe International Society of Cultural-historical
Activity Researchʼ (ISCAR) Congress in Natal.

* Manolis Dafermos
mdafermo@uoc.gr
1
Department Psychology, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece

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different moments of their life have to deal with various forms of crises (environmental cri-
sis, public health crisis, socio-economic crisis, psychological crisis, educational crisis, etc.).
Stetsenko provides a deep and penetrating account of the current crisis and its challenges for
CHAT: ‘We are currently in an acute crisis, if not an apocalyptic catastrophe, witnessing tur-
moil of a drastic, monumental, and far-reaching nature and proportions. This crisis cannot be
ignored in discussing CHAT, our scholarship, the fate of academia, and the very prospects of
our future lives and survival’ (Stetsenko, 2021). Crises bring to light uncomfortable truths,
reveal hidden conflicts and open new unpredictable paths of global crisis.
This paper raises the following three questions: (1) What is the origin of the concept of crisis
in the history of human thought? (2) What is the meaning of the concept ‘crisis’ in Vygotsky’s
project? (3) How is it possible to develop a dialectical understanding of the crisis in cultural-
historical activity research at the crossroads of socio-economic, ecological and health crises?
The purpose of the present paper is to provoke open and constructive dialogue on the
concept of crisis in the field of cultural-historical activity research and to call attention to
perspectives regarding its further development. The paper highlights the importance of dia-
lectics for understanding and further elaboration of the concept of crisis in cultural-historical
activity research. Many scholars have noted the centrality of dialectical thinking to cultural-
historical activity research (Fleer & Veresov, 2018; Dafermos, 2018, 2021; Elhammoumi,
2015; de Aguiar et al, 2020; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2010). From a dialectical perspective,
concepts are historically grounded. Consequently, the concept of crisis should be conceived
dialectically in terms of its historicity. Precisely for this reason, the paper provides a brief
history of the concept of crisis.
Additionally, the paper highlights the central importance of the concept of crisis in Vygotsky’s
project. Vygotsky’s project was formed in a period of a socio-economic and political turmoil. Psy-
chology at that time was a discipline in crisis. Α critical reflection on Vygotsky’s way of conceptu-
alising the crisis within psychology can become a source of insight for further elaboration of this
concept in today’s crisis-ridden world. Vygotsky’s treatment of the concept of crisis is examined
as a moment in the history of human thought and not as an isolated phenomenon.
Based on the dialectics, Vygotsky provides a dialectical explanation of crisis as a part
of a non-reductionist, materialist, non-dualistic conceptualization of human development
(Fleer & Veresov, 2018; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2010). A dialectical perspective is crucial
not only to understand the philosophical underpinnings of Vygotsky’s theory but also to
shed light on the social and scientific context of its formation. Furthermore, the very pro-
cess of the emergence and formation of Vygotsky’s theory can be seen as a contradictory
developmental process in terms of a drama of ideas (Dafermos, 2018).
Beginning with the historicisation of the crisis concept and continuing with the concep-
tualization of crisis in Vygotsky’s project, the paper moves forward to the contemporary
context of cultural-historical activity research. It is proposed that dialectics can contribute
to the regeneration of cultural-historical activity theory in times of dramatic, multifaceted,
global crises and unfinalised transitions.

Historicizing the Concept of ‘Crisis’

One of the difficulties in defining the term ‘crisis’ is that its meaning varies in significant
ways across disciplines such as economics, politics, medicine and psychology. Moreover,
it is important to reveal how the term ‘crisis’ is perceived, interpreted and implemented in
different socio-cultural contexts from various positions.

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Discussing the Concept of Crisis

Τhe transformation of the fashionable term ‘crisis’ into a universal scheme for interpre-
tation of all challenges may provoke trivialisation and confusion. Historicising and con-
textualising the term ‘crisis’ is necessary to avoid confusion. Although the history of the
concept ‘crisis’ has not yet been written, I will outline some milestones in its emergence
and formation in the history of human thought.
The term ‘crisis’ originates from the Ancient Greek verb ‘κρίνειν’ that means ‘to sepa-
rate’, ‘distinguish’, ‘judge’ or to ‘decide’ (Shank, 2008; Sturm & Mülberger, 2012, p. 425;
Dafermos, 2013a). In the ancient Greek language, the word ‘κρίσις’ means the critical
point or critical phase in the development of a disease, that is, the point at which a patient
is judged to live or die. According to the Hippocratic treatise ‘On Affections’, crisis ‘occurs
in diseases whenever the diseases increase in intensity or go away or change into another
disease or end altogether’ (Starn, 1971, p. 4). According to the medical meaning of the
word, during a crisis, the patient is on the verge of life and death. A crisis is a critical
point in the progression of disease when everything is possible. Either the illness will tri-
umph and lead to the death of the patient or natural processes will make the patient recover.
Being in a crisis means being at the borderline between life and death.
The juridical meaning of the term ‘crisis’ (κρίση) in ancient Greece was related to the
court’s decision (‘legal decision’). The court in Ancient Athens could decide whether the
accused was innocent or guilty and whether he/she should live or die.
It is important to mention that for Vygotsky, the juridical meaning of the word ‘crisis’
was a familiar topic because he studied at the Faculty of Law. Additionally, Vygotsky had to
deal with medical crises during a long period of his short life. Both Vygotsky and Hamlet,
his literary hero, lived and reflected on the borderline between life and death. Identifying
himself with Hamlet, Vygotsky attempted to respond to urgent social, cultural and personal
challenges in the concrete historical context.
Adopting a medical model for history, and as a physician, Thucydides offered a pro-
found diagnosis of crisis as a decisive turning point of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides
employed the concept of the crisis for the explanation of political and military conflicts. He
offered an account of the Peloponnesian War and the decline of Athens in terms of tragedy.
The crisis refers also to the climax of the plot, the turning point of a drama because of a
conflict and dramatic struggle between opposing forces. ‘Unlike such organic analogies as
the cycle of birth, maturity and death, a crisis pattern could be open-ended, unpredictable,
dynamic, rather than static’ (Starn, 1971, p. 5).
The juridical meaning of crisis had been accepted and transformed in the Old and New
Testaments. The theological teaching on the Last Judgement (judicium) is connected with
the apocalyptic expectation of salvation (Koselleck, 2006). Apocalypticism in its various
transformations is especially strong in times of crises such as pandemics, political turmoil
and wars.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concept of ‘crisis’ took the mean-
ing of a difficult decisive moment in the discussion about politics (‘ministerial crisis’,
‘dynastic crisis’, ‘crise ministerielle’, ‘crise politique’). Rousseau in his ʻEmileʼ stated
that ‘We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions’ (Rousseau, 1979, p.
194). The political crises act as the catalyst for the death of the old political order and the
emergence of the new. The concept of the crisis was employed to explain a ‘problematic’
situation or the decisive moment, the turning point of social change (Ritter, 1986).
The concept ‘crisis’ opens the path for conceptualising human history in terms of drama.
Hegel (2001) provided an account of the World’s history as a theatre, a stage on which
the World Spirit appears and progressively achieves self-consciousness. Ηegel developed

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a system of theoretical concepts for a dialectical reflection of dramatic conflicts, negation

and transitions as acts of the drama of the world’s history.
During the nineteenth century, crisis became an important concept of political economy
for the periodic outbreaks of disorder (Ritter, 1986). John Stuart Mill’s ‘Treatise on Political
Economy’ (1848) employed the concept of ‘commercial crisis’ as that moment when ‘a great
number of merchants and traders, at once, either have, or apprehend that they shall have, a
difficulty in meeting their engagements’. There are striking similarities and important differ-
ences in the understanding of the crisis in the work of J. S. Mill and K. Marx. Based on the
materialist dialectic, Marx offered evidence that economic crises are the inevitable result of
the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Like Thucydides as a physi-
cian who analysed the crises of the Peloponnesian War, Marx investigated the crises of the
capitalist system. Marx’s systematic investigation of the capitalistic system and its crises res-
onates with Spinoza’s words ‘not to be astounded, not to laugh, not to cry, but to understand’
that inspired Vygotsky (1987, p.10).
Challenging the interpretation of crises as accidental and irrational phenomena,
Marx offers evidence that crises are an inevitable part of the dramatic development
of the capitalist mode of production and reproduction. ‘The life of modern industry
becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis and
stagnation’ (Marx, 2010b, p.455). Focusing on the necessity of crises, Marx noted ‘the
universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action.’ For Luxemburg (1900), ‘crises
are an organic manifestation inseparable from the capitalist economy.’ Marx’s concept
of crisis and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in a capitalist system is still the
subject of debate.
In contrast to Marxist accounts of the permanent tendency for crisis inherent to the capi-
talist mode of production, ʻthe Weberian methodological turn in crisis theory’ pluralises
forms of crisis as a way to resist economic determinism (Roitman, 2014, p. 82). The con-
cept ‘crisis’ was extrapolated to explain problematic trends in the field of society, culture,
science, etc. Spengler (1991) declared the ‘decline of the West’. Husserl (1970) addressed
the issue of ‘the crisis of the European Sciences’. Kuhn (1962) raised the topic of crises and
scientific revolutions in the context of the history of philosophy of science. Obviously, the
concept of crisis is used to describe trends that are observed in almost all aspects of social
life. Freeden (2017, p.17) has reported that ‘the concept of crisis spreads like a contagious
disease, permeating and disjointedly infecting ever-broader discursive spheres’. The post-
modern pluralisation of crises expresses an increasing fragmentation of both social life
and human subjectivity. Post-modernism is an expression of the uncritical acceptance of
increasing fragmentation and dissolution taken for granted.
‘Crisis’ became a key concept for the consideration both of modernity and post-modernity.
It marks a new understanding of history that differs from both the ancient, cyclic, model of
time and the modern idea of gradual, linear, cumulative progress. The emergence of various
forms of crisis challenges ‘the Enlightenment belief in the irreversible progress of humanity
towards happiness’ (Roitman, 2014, p. 86). Koselleck (1988) examined the dynamic relation-
ship between critique and crisis during the period of modernity.
The concept ‘crisis’ has been used with various meanings: (1) a ‘chain of events lead-
ing to a culminating, decisive point at which action is required’. (2) ‘…a unique and final
point, after which the quality of history will be changed forever’, (3) ‘a critical situation
which may constantly recur or else to situations in which decisions have momentous

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consequences’ and (4) ‘…a historically immanent transitional phase’ (Koselleck, 2006,
pp.371–372).
The crisis is discussed in relation to other concepts such as ‘risk’, ‘catastrophe’
and ‘liminality’. Beck (1999) proposed the emergence of a ‘world society of risk’
in connection with dynamic modernisation and globalisation. Catastrophe theory was
developed as a branch of mathematics for explaining the abrupt changes of discon-
tinuous dependent variables. The concept of catastrophe has also been applied to the
study of biological and social processes (Deakin, 1980). For Beck (1999, p.24), ‘Risk
society is a catastrophic society. In it the exceptional condition threatens to become
the norm’.
The concept of liminality refers to the experience of standing at a threshold and being
forced to make choices. The term ‘liminality’ was employed for conceptualising rite pas-
sage in small-scale societies and later expanded to include experiences of ambiguity, diso-
rientation and ‘cultural hybridity’ in post-modern condition (Thomassen, 2014).
The concept of crisis in its relation to all the above concepts reflects various dimensions
of social change. ‘Crisis’ was transformed from a marginal concept to a fundamental mode
of interpreting contemporary historical time (Krasteva, 2019). Despite the significant dif-
ferences in its meaning, the concept ‘crisis’ highlights historicity and temporality as essen-
tial dimensions of the study of modernity.
The dominant modern conceptualizations of crisis have been challenged by the episte-
mologies of the Global South. From the perspective of the epistemologies of global South,
the contemporary crisis is the crisis of the particular world, ‘the dominant form of Euro-
modernity (capitalist, rationalist, liberal, secular, patriarchal, white…)’ (de Sousa Santos &
Menese, 2020, p. 43). From this standpoint, crisis involves the prospect of moving towards
‘a multiplicity of worlds’ by making use of the diversity of experiences and social practices
across countries and continents.

Contextualising Vygotsky’s Project

Vygotsky (1997a) employed the concept of ‘crisis’ in the context of a critique of psy-
chology as a ‘problematic’ discipline. Moreover, this concept is crucial for the con-
ceptualisation of Vygotsky’s project. It is not enough to detect various ways of using
this concept in Vygotsky’s writings. More generally, Vygotsky’s project cannot be
sufficiently understood without the concept of crisis. Vygotsky during his life course
had experienced various crises: He experienced discrimination and pogrom against the
Jewish population at an early age and the death of his family members. He suffered not
only from a progressive form of tuberculosis but also from unfair criticism of his the-
ory and the split in his scientific school. Growing through multiple crises, Vygotsky’s
sense of the complexity and contradictory nature of social and personal life was deep-
ened. From this perspective, Vygotsky’s life and the development of his theory can be
understood as an optimistic tragedy. In contrast to the widespread understanding of
Vygotsky’s theory as a readymade set of ideas that it is possible to apply instrumen-
tally, the concept of crisis offers the opportunity to reveal the temporality and historic-
ity of Vygotsky’s project (Dafermos, 2018).
From my perspective, the very process of the emergence and formation of Vygotsky’s pro-
ject can be examined in terms of drama that includes both crises and attempts to overcome

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them.2 Vygotsky’s project emerged in the tragic and heroic period of human history con-
nected with the collapse of the Russian empire, the October revolution and the first period of
building the new society. Participating actively in the process of social change required new
forms of conceptualising human development.
Luria compared the experiences of Western and American psychologists, who ‘…spent
their lives in a comparatively quiet, slow-moving environment’, and their work consists
of ‘doing research and sometimes moving from university to university’. Luria described
his experience of living in ‘…the fantastically stimulating atmosphere of an active, rap-
idly changing society. My entire generation was infused with the energy of revolutionary
change -the liberating energy people feel when they are part of a society that is able to
make tremendous progress in a very short time’ (Luria, 2010, p.17). It was an intense his-
torical time that was full of conflicts, crises, transitions and transformations. Participating
in transformative societal practice in critical times and reflecting these processes is a way
of promoting new, original conceptualisations of human development.
Vygotsky grew up in a unique chronotope between the decline of pre-revolutionary Rus-
sia and the birth of new society, between the anxiety of the collapse of the old world and
the enthusiasm of the radical reorganisation of social life and between the aesthetic sen-
sibilities of the Silver Age intelligentsia and socially transformative practice. On the bor-
der between different cultural traditions is created space not only for dramatic tensions but
also for unpredictable synthesis. The co-existence of Promethean collectivism of the Soviet
epoch with Hamlet’s existential questions of the Silver Age intelligentsia contributed to the
formation of a unique socio-cultural background of Vygotsky. Participating in a socially
transformative practice, Vygotsky was aware of the insufficiency of the explanation of
human development in terms of slow, cumulative, quantitative growth.
Dialectics becomes especially important in times of social crises, turmoil, wars and revo-
lutions. In critical times, the dominant views of society and individuals based on a meta-
physical way of thinking in terms of an aggregate of stable entities demonstrate their inad-
equacy to explain the historical process with its unexpected twists and turns (Dafermos,
2021). In a challenging period, the need arises to develop the dialectical way of thinking that
highlights ‘conflictuality of the social world’ (Schraube, 2015) and the complex, dynamic
character of human development. From a dialectical perspective, the crisis is not only some-
thing negative or positive itself but a critical moment of a dynamic, contradictory, develop-
mental process (Dafermos, 2018).

Crisis in Psychology

Although the academic institutionalisation of psychology as an independent discipline

occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, an enduring sense of the crisis was gener-
alised, and various descriptions and explanations emerged (Bühler, 1927; Driesch, 1925;

2
I adopt the following assumptions from Vygotsky’s work ‘The historical sense of the psychological cri-
sis’: ‘…the development and downfall of concepts, even the replacement of classifications etc.,-all this can
be scientifically explained by the links of the science in question with (l) the general socio-cultural context
of the era; (2) the general conditions and laws of scientific knowledge (3) the objective demands upon the
scientific knowledge that follow from the nature of the phenomena studied in a given stage of investigation’
(Vygotsky, 1997a, b, p.242). From this perspective, it is difficult to adequately explain Vygotsky’s use of the
concept of crisis without understanding crisis-ridden society in which he lived. Moreover, psychology at
that time was a discipline in crisis.

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Koffka, 1935; Lewin, 1931). At the beginning of his engagement in the field of psychology,
Vygotsky was aware of its crisis. Vygotsky offered an interesting definition of the crisis
in his work ʻPreface to Thorndikeʼ: ‘in this transitional revolutionary period when the old
and previous concepts are hopelessly compromised and unfit for further use, and adequate
new concepts that can replace them have not yet been created. A fruitful and beneficial
revolution and crisis in science implies almost always a painful and excruciating crisis in
the teaching and study of this science’ (Vygotsky, 1997b, p.147). The crisis was defined by
Vygotsky as a situation of the contradictory co-existence between the destruction of old,
previous, concepts on the one hand and the emergence of new concepts on the other. The
old concepts have been hopelessly compromised, while the new concepts have not yet been
created. Vygotsky described not only the juncture in Western psychology and Russian psy-
chology after the October revolution but also his personal experience in the teaching and
study of psychology as ‘a painful and excruciating crisis’ (Vygotsky, 1997b, p.147).
Moving from the periphery to the centre of Vygotsky’s research, the crisis in psychol-
ogy became the subject matter of a systematic, methodological investigation in his manu-
script ‘The historical sense of the psychological crisis’. ‘…It was not the crisis in world
psychology, but the crisis of his own approach that inspired the book’ (Veresov, 1999,
p.147). The crisis of a discipline is refracted through the conceptual development of a con-
crete scientist. Dramatic tensions and collisions in a discipline can provoke a series of cri-
ses in the personal and professional development of a scientist.
Vygotsky’s treatment of crisis differs not only from the positivist account of continuous,
quantitative accumulative growth but also from the post-structural/post-modern celebration
of discontinuities and differences. Vygotsky’s treatment of crisis is based on the dialecti-
cal relationship between continuity and discontinuity, qualitative and quantitative changes.
The connection between opposite sides and forces of the developmental process is intrinsi-
cally dynamic and dialectical rather than static and metaphysical.
The concept of ‘crisis’ was employed for articulating the specific mechanisms related
to personality development. Vygotsky (1998) examined crises from the perspective of the
transition from one age to another as a result of internal conflicts. ‘During these periods,
abrupt and major shifts and displacements, changes and discontinuities in the child’s per-
sonality are concentrated in a relatively short time… In a very short time, the child changes
completely in the basic traits of his personality. Development takes on a stormy, impetuous,
and sometimes catastrophic character that resembles a revolutionary course of events in
both the rate of the changes that are occurring and in the sense of the alterations that are
made’ (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 191).
Vygotsky demonstrated the double nature of the crisis. Crises strengthen the trends of
‘disintegration and breakdown of what had been formed at preceding stages’ (Vygotsky,
1998, p.192). The intensification of external conflicts with others, the internal conflicts and
the strengthening of negativity accompany the critical periods. Simultaneously, crises force
the transition to new stages of development. Both negative and constructive dimensions of
a crisis in its contradictory unity create the space of human development.
‘Crisis’ is embedded in a conceptual system that includes concepts such as ‘social situ-
ation of development’, ‘ages’, ‘new formation’ (novoobrazivanie) and ‘perezhivanie’. The
concept of ‘crisis’ is not an isolated concept but a moment of a dialectical account of the
contradictory, developmental process as a dialectical unity of qualitative and quantita-
tive changes, progression and regression, emergence and disappearance. As Polivanova
(2015) has demonstrated, a crisis is not just a period of change of the social situation of
development or a critical period of the transition from one age to another. A crisis can be

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understood as a space of the developmental act. Α crisis acquires rich conceptual content
when it comes to portraying a broader developmental process.
Vygotsky employed the concept of the crisis not only in relation to short critical periods
between periods of stable development but in the wider sense of the word. ‘Crises are not
a temporary condition, but the way of inner life’ (Vygodskaya & Lifanova, 1999, p.25). In
contrast to environmental determinism, Vygotsky focused on the study of the dynamics
of internal tensions and conflicts. ‘But essential to every crisis is the fact that the internal
changes occur in a much greater dimension than the changes in the external circumstances,
and for this reason they always cause impressions of an internal crisis’ (Vygotsky, 1998,
p.296). The concept of crisis brings to light the complex, changing, relationship between
the personality and social environment and various ways of their experiencing (perezhi-
vanie), the dynamics of the objective-subjective relationship, the conflicting nature of psy-
chic life, the complex links between the internal and external tensions and conflicts that
serve as a driving force of development.
Psychological development is not reduced to an adaptation of a personality to the exter-
nal environment or to the establishment of the equilibrium as it has been accepted in North
American functionalism. ‘If life surrounding him does not present challenges to an individ-
ual, if his usual and inherent reactions are in complete equilibrium with the world around
him, then there will be no basis for him to exercise creativity. A creature that is perfectly
adapted to its environment, would not want anything, would not have anything to strive for,
and, of course, would not be able to create anything’ (Vygotsky, 2004, pp.28–29). Chal-
lenging the functionalist concepts of adaptation and equilibrium, Vygotsky demonstrated
that the dramatic tensions and conflicts in the relationship between a personality and social
environment become the source of psychological development. ‘…The painful experiences
forcing people into life crises were often at the same time enlightening experiences forc-
ing people to grow beyond their previews limitations’ (Rappoport, 1986, p.176). From a
dialectical perspective, pain, disappointments, failures, mistakes, regressions, enormous
swings, crises and leaps are not accidental but inevitable moments of a developmental pro-
cess. ʻDarkʼ and negative sides of human life may be transformed into their opposites.
The regeneration of life often takes place through crises. Without a dialectical account
of the drama of human development, it is difficult to grasp the contradictory nature of expe-
riencing a crisis and the co-existence of various ways to go through it. The drama of human
development found its expression in the Phoenix metaphor. The Phoenix was the mythical
birth that could obtain new life and rise from its own ashes. Going through the crisis is a
life-changing perezhivanie that opens the perspective of reconstruction, re-organisation and
regeneration. The Phoenix metaphor depicts the contradictory co-existence of the negative
and positive, the continuity and discontinuity in human development. The vacuum of a cri-
sis paves the way for qualitative reorganisations and empowerment. The possibility of radi-
cal transformation emerges from awareness of the impossibility to continue living in the
same repetitive, adaptive way. Calling into question the individualistic approaches to per-
sonality rebirth, Vygotsky’s project highlights human development and learning through
active, transformative engagement in social life and collaboration with others.
One of the reasons for the crisis of mainstream psychology is connected with the repro-
duction of a static model of human functioning and stressing on adaptation to a social envi-
ronment that has been taken as stable given and unchangeable. The concept of ‘crisis’ is
crucial for understanding the human becoming an active, transformative process within the
space of collaborative practices.
The concept of ‘crisis’ is internally connected with the concept of perezhivanie (Dafermos,
2018; Vygotsky, 1994b). It is not enough to describe how people are trapped in critical situations.

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Discussing the Concept of Crisis

It is crucial to examine how the concrete subjects make sense of a problematic situation and
attempt to go through it. The crisis can be examined as a multidirectional labyrinth, a complex
branching puzzle with multiple choices of paths and directions. Labyrinth is not only the place
where we get lost but mainly the journey to discover ourselves and become aware of the com-
plexity of the world and its various potentialities. By developing creative, mediating activity, peo-
ple explore the labyrinth and invent cultural means that allow them to get out of it.
Development has contradictory and non-linear character. The developmental process
includes both rising and falling, progressive evolution and retrogressive involution as its nec-
essary moments. The negative sides of the developmental process can contain positive poten-
tial. Vygotsky noted that ‘a defect is not only a minus, a deficit, or a weakness but also a plus,
a source of strength’ (Vygotsky, 1993, p.56) and that ‘along with a defect come combative
psychological tendencies and the potential for overcoming the defect’ (Vygotsky, 1993, p.57).
In contrast to the naturalistic accounts such as ‘humanistic psychology’ and ‘positive psy-
chology’ focused on the positive, pre-existing potential of human nature, Vygotsky demon-
strated that the active engagement of people in social life, with all the challenges, problems
and crises that it contains, is the source of human development. Naturalistic and individualistic
accounts of human nature have been commercialised and accepted as a part of the dominant,
technocratic crisis management. The focus on the transformative potential of crises and their
developmental possibilities is one of the most important contributions of cultural-historical
activity research. Human development is internally connected with active participation in
social life, co-creation with others and social transformation (Stetsenko, 2012).

Regenerating Cultural‑historical Activity Research in Times of Global

Crises

The contemporary reception of Vygotsky’s theory occurred in the tragic and contradictory
period of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The neoliberal triumph of homo economicus
was labelled as the ‘end of history.’3 Ηomo economicus is a competitive, entrepreneurial
agent with instrumental and cost–benefit relationships with others (Teo, 2018). However,
the triumph of neo-liberalism and the celebration of the ‘neoliberal form of subjectivity’
(Teo, 2018) became a starting point for new series of socio-economic and environmental
crises rather than the ‘end of history’.
Crises act as accelerators of the ‘whole process of history’. According to Burckhardt
(1979, p.224), ‘a crisis in the whole state of things is produced, involving whole epochs
and all or many peoples of the same civilisation…. The historical process is suddenly
accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit
by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled’.
The concept of ‘crisis’ is crucial for understanding not only psychological development
but more broadly human development in the wider context of social, cultural history. There
is a close connection between the system of social relations and personality development. It
is difficult to understand personality development without a broader vision of society and its
internal contradictions. ‘The various internal contradictions which are to be found in differ-
ent social systems find their expression both in the type of personality and in the structure

3
On the influence of the ‘end of history’ politics on the reception of Vygotsky’s theory, see Stetsenko
(2013, 2020) and Dafermos (2016).

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and development of human psychology in that historical period’ (Vygotsky, 1994a, p.176).
In contrast to the dominant accounts based on the psychologisation, individualisation and
pathologisation of human development, Vygotsky reveals the internal connection between
social and individual development and inter-psychological and intra-psychological pro-
cesses and highlights the social roots of distorted development in its multiple forms.
The elaboration of the concept of crisis as a part of a broader vision of society in the
process of its historical development can become an important moment of regenerating
cultural-historical, activity theory addressed by a group of scholars (Ferholt et al., 2020;
Jornet et al., 2020). The project of the regeneration of cultural-historical, activity theory
is an important step in this direction. From my perspective, the regeneration of the tenets
of cultural-historical activity research may be presented in terms of the Hegelian concept
of ‘sublation’ (‘aufhebung’, ‘snjatie’) that means to cancel, preserve and bring to a higher
level (Dafermos, 2018; Van der Zweerde, 1997). Dialectical sublation is neither a simple
rejection/revision nor simple preservation of cultural-historical, activity theories in their
existing forms.
Crises, even when they are not reshaping history or changing its direction, act as its
accelerator. Because of the acceleration of history, what seems impossible becomes possi-
ble and real in a short time. During ongoing and unprecedented global crises, it is essential
to think, imagine, learn and develop out of the box. It is essential to develop international,
cross-country, cross-disciplinary, long-term research on global challenges to humanity,
such as global environmental crisis and extreme global inequality in relation to human
development. In the midst of unprecedented socio-economic and ecological crises, it is
necessary to think globally and locally and act globally and locally from the standpoint of
social justice.
It is difficult to make sense of the increased catastrophic trends without a broader view
of the history of society in the long-term perspective. The introduction of the concept of
Anthropocene serves as a way to discuss the crisis of the Earth System, caused by human
activity (Angus, 2016). Μaking Earth an increasingly uninhabitable planet through bio-
diversity loss and climate change is a major crisis. Inevitably a question arose: is it the
human activity in general which destroys ecological systems or a specific, social form of
activity formed at a certain stage of historical development? Global challenges and vari-
ous crises and disasters usually are perceived as exogenous or accidental events ‘…nothing
to do with any inherent flaws in the capitalist mode of production and the social structure
of society’ (Michaels, 2020). The dominant Anthropocene argument does not engage the
issues of power, work and capital for the explanation of the origin of the current ongoing
environmental crisis. Examining the Anthropos, humanity in terms of an undifferentiated
whole, the dominant Anthropocene argument reproduces the nature/society binary based
on Cartesian dualism (Moore, 2016). It is difficult to explain the metabolic rift between
society and nature without a systematic investigation of the endless accumulation of capi-
tal, the dominance of neo-colonial politics and the injustice to indigenous people, etc.
Traditionally, the crisis is considered a temporary condition. However, nowadays, cri-
ses become long-lasting, permanent and endemic in a rapidly changing world. ‘When one
crisis ends, another, which in the meantime has come to lick round our borders, steps in
to take its place. Or perhaps it is the same huge crisis that feeds on itself and changes over
time, transforming and regenerating itself like a monstrous teratogenic entity’ (Bauman
& Bordoni, 2014, pp.6–7). In other words, the crisis as ‘a monstrous teratogenic entity’
becomes the ‘new normal’. The inability to prevent crises and the failure of crisis manage-
ment is one of the most important dimensions of contemporary crises.

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Discussing the Concept of Crisis

Gramsci offered an expressive description of the meaning of the crisis: ‘The crisis con-
sists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this inter-
regnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (Gramsci, 1971, p.276). It has been
reported that we live in an age of monsters, in times of ‘necropolitics’ (Mbembe, 2019),
‘zombie economics’ (Quiggin, 2010) and ‘zombie capitalism’ (McNally, 2011). An
increasing culture of cruelty, insensitivity to human suffering, massive investments in mili-
tary power, slow violence and cynicism, ‘racial and class-based health disparities in the
current COVID-19 pandemic’ (Sandset, 2021) are facets of the death-dealing policies and
practices driven by a market logic.
Marx used the vampire metaphor for reflecting the relation between capital and labour:
‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the
more, the more labour it sucks’ (Marx, 2010b, p.241). Vampires of capital reduce person-
ality to an unthinking body-machine, while human transformative activity degrades into
adaptive motor behaviour. The profit-making machine with the imperative of infinite eco-
nomic growth becomes more and more incompatible with the survival of life on Earth.
The world economic crisis of 2008 brought to the fore worldwide societal problems such
as growing poverty, mass unemployment, exponential increases in social inequality and
destruction of natural recourses and livelihoods.
One of the most important difficulties of the current social crisis is connected with the
grotesque dominance of living dead forms of being and ideas (Quiggin, 2010) as well as
the confusion of the relation between the Old and the New. Berthold Brecht examined the
reversal of the relationship of the New and the Old in his poem ‘Parade of the Old New’:
‘The Old and the Very Old, now re-entering the arena, proclaim themselves as new, or
else it is held to be new when the Old or the Very Old are put over in a new way. But the
New, having been deposed today, is declared old-fashioned, degraded to being a transitory
phase whose day is done’ (Brecht, 2018, p.190). The reversal into the opposite is a constit-
uent feature of Brecht’s ‘dialectical theatre’. The estrangement effect proposed by Berthold
Brecht is very close to the device of making strange (пpиём oтcтpaнeния) of Russian for-
malism that was examined by Vygotsky (1987) in his ‘Psychology of Art’.
It looks like the transformation of an idea into its opposite penetrates ‘the dialectical
theatre’ of world history. The ‘Great Reset’ project (Schwab & Malleret, 2020) for the post-
pandemic era is a new, fashionable version of an outdated technocratic vision of the future,
while the perspective of a new society beyond oppression, colonialism and patriarchy looks
like an old-fashioned utopia. The reversal of the relationship between the New and the
Old is a form of destructive carnivalization of social progress. The COVID-19 pandemic
is examined as a turning point that can restructure every aspect of society. More gener-
ally, a wide range of crises has led to the reconfiguration of the social structure. As Klein
(2007) has demonstrated in her work ‘The Shock Doctrine’, climate disasters, wars and
financial crises have been used to impose privatisation, reconstructing work relationships
and enhancing exploitation in terms of creative destruction.
Margaret Thatcher’s words ‘There is no such thing as society’ reflect real tendencies of
social disintegration and toxic individualism. Fragmentation processes and increasing indi-
vidualism destroy the cultural ‘ideal forms’ that act as a model for what should be achieved
at the end of the developmental process. Developing social solidarity and active partici-
pation in social life becomes an urgent need especially in times of crisis. ‘As long as we
function as individuals, our ability to solve complex social problems will fail us’ (Bailey
& Lobenstine, 2020). Social fragmentation and erosion of communities destroy not only
‘ideal forms’ but also the potential for social and personality development.

13
 Dafermos

Developing social ‘ideal forms’ is a necessary condition for personality and social
development. The promotion of social ‘ideal forms’ goes through the historicising neo-
liberal form of subjectivity. The ontological priority of the individual over the collective
is not an expression of eternal human nature but a product of a concrete stage of historical
development. It is difficult to find a concept of individualised self before the eighteenth
century. For example, from the perspective of Ancient Greek philosophy, a post-modern
selfish, narcissist agent with instrumental relations with other people, homo economicus
reducing everything to some kind of economic calculus of cost and benefit, is an idiot.
The English word ‘idiot’ originates from the Ancient Greek word ‘ideotes’, private citizen
or individual (from ‘idios’, private, ‘one’s own’). ‘Idiotes’ were self-sufficient individuals
concerned to maximise utility and ignored the need of the community (Dafermos, 2013b).
For Aristotle (1984), human beings are active participants of a political (social) community
rather than utility-maximising, self-sufficient individualised agents, homo economicus.
From this perspective, homo economicus is homo narcissus and homo idioticus.
The awareness of the toxic nature of individualism develops in various historical and
cultural contexts. For example, the African Ubuntu maxim ‘I am because we are’ reflects
a dialectical understanding of the inter-relations between the individual and community. It
looks like individualism is a result of fictional universalism, an abstract, problematic gen-
eralisation that does not reflect the big variety of ways of cultural development in different
parts of the globe. Vygotsky pointed out that ‘As a result of the advance of capitalism, the
development of material production simultaneously brought with it the progressive divi-
sion of labour and the constantly growing distorted development of the human potential’
(Vygotsky, 1994a, p. 178). The growing fragmentation and individualisation of society
coexist with its cultural homogenisation and decline of creative potential for socio-cultural
and personal development. Nowadays there is a strong tendency to the disintegration of
both the social and the individual, the social and biological. The postmodernist declaration
of ‘the death of the subject’ (Kvale, 1992) reflects the high degree of widespread social dis-
integration. From my perspective, the postmodernist declaration of ‘the death of the sub-
ject’ is part of the dominant necro-politics.
One of the important dimensions of the dominance of neo-liberalism is connected with
the occupation of social imaginaries by exaggerated individualism and consumerism.
Haiven (2014) examines the crises of capitalism as a massive failure of the imagination.
Challenging fetishised, converted forms, ‘false consciousness’, the development of creative
imagination becomes an important dimension of critical consciousness and conscientisa-
tion (conscientização) (Freire, 2000). Without a radicalisation of imagination through the
creation of alternative imaginary landscapes of the common good, new horizons of mutual
solidarity, it is really difficult to go beyond the crisis of global capitalism. Historicising
individualism, competition and consumerism and questioning their interpretation as an
expression of eternal human nature is a way to resist the ʻdisimagination machineʼ (Giroux,
2013) and radicalise social and personal imagination. For Vygotsky (2004), imagination as
a higher psychological function has a crucial role in taking distance from the immediate
situation and constraints of the environment. Escaping from now and here, looking forward
to possible worlds opens up new avenues of resistance and human behaviour in adverse
conditions.
Vygotsky developed his theory as a way to overcome the crisis in psychology. Nowa-
days some scholars argue that not only psychology but, more generally, science is expe-
riencing a crisis from the epistemological, methodological, ethical, institutional, political
perspectives (Saltelli, 2018). One of the dimensions of this crisis in science is related to
the deterioration of the quality of mass production of scientific publications that mainly

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Discussing the Concept of Crisis

takes the form of routine, repetitive activity. ‘…current practice of mass production of pub-
lications is misleading and redundant, it creates research waste, distorts science…’ (Barić
et al., 2017, p.2). The lack of original, innovative ideas is linked with the dominant ten-
dency of the imitation of scientific activity for management, advertising, public relations
that have been labelled as zombie science. ‘Zombie science is science that is dead but will
not lie down. It keeps twitching and lumbering around so that (from a distance, and with
your eyes half-closed) zombie science looks much like real science. But in fact the zombie
has no life of its own; it is animated and moved only by the incessant pumping of funds’
(Charlton, 2008, p.327).
It is possible to examine reductionism and elementalism as forms of living dead ideas
because they undermine the prospect of studying socio-historical and biological processes
in terms of an organic whole. The dominant reductionist and elementalist views are unable
to deal with the complexity of human subjectivity, societal and natural history and address
some of the most urgent social and ecological problems. As Anna Stetsenko (2015, p. 102)
notes, ‘There is a pressing need today for alternative models of science’ beyond both objec-
tivist scientism and postmodernist relativism. Τhe liberation of scientific imagination from
the shackles of positivism, elementalism and reductionism that remains the epistemologi-
cal background of the bulk of published empirical studies is crucial to overcome the crisis
of science and develop ‘creative synthesis’ (Tateo & Marsico, 2021).
More generally, the crisis in science is expressed in the escalating mismatch between
the tendency of the reproduction of scientific knowledge in its existing form, while the
needs and conditions for substantial development and its radical transformation are matur-
ing. From a Vygotskian perspective, crises in science can be examined not only in the light
of their negative dimensions but mainly through the prospect of maturing the need for radi-
cally new approaches that break with the prevailing practices of fragmentation of knowl-
edge and ‘cult of empiricism’ (Toulmin & Leary, 1985). As Albert Einstein once said, ‘We
can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’.
Crises in science pave the way for scientific revolutions that lead to substantial transfor-
mations of the foundations of theory, methodology and practice. The impending scientific
revolution is connected with the dramatic and creative transition towards an integrative,
synthetic science that can be made from the standpoint of ‘human society, or social human-
ity’ (Marx, 2010a, p.5).
In the light of the impending scientific revolution, it is important to develop cultural-
historical and activity research across generations, across national and disciplinary bound-
aries. Moreover, creating space for critical dialogue between cultural-historical activity
research and critical approaches in psychology, pedagogy and social theory becomes fun-
damental for the ISCAR community (Fleer et al., 2020). Jovanović (2021) argues that ‘it
is necessary to reclaim critique in order to turn crises into a possible instigation to eman-
cipatory processes’. In the middle of acute crises and unfinalised historical transitions, the
agenda of the dialogue between cultural-historical activity research and critical approaches
should include the topics of social contradictions, human subjectivity, social imaginaries
and transformative practice. Moreover, it is important to think seriously about what kind
of theoretical tools are missing in order to conceptualise radical change (Jovanović, 2021).
Reflecting backward and reflecting forward, travelling back to the earlier stages of the
history of culture and anticipating the future society is a way to resist socio-cultural amne-
sia and deliberate and radicalise scientific imagination. Especially in times of crisis, people
lose their orientation in time. They tend to extrapolate the present situation connected with
the dominance of oppression to the past and the future. ‘The individual is divided between
an identical past and present, and a future without hope. He or she is a person who does

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not perceive himself or herself as becoming’ (Freire, 2000, p.173). Rethinking the history
of culture, promoting the open-ended, multi-voiced dialogue between the past and present
cultural forms is an important source of inspiration, learning and resistance under adverse
conditions.
I want to discuss the myth of Prometheus as a part of this dialogue between the past and
the present cultural forms in times of crisis. The myth of Prometheus is an important meta-
phor from a cultural-historical, activity perspective, as well as the myth of Oedipus, and
crucial for the development of psychoanalysis. The rebel titan Prometheus was the oppo-
nent of tyrannical gods and an advocate for humanity. Prometheus gave people not only
fire but more generally materials and symbolic tools. Prometheus was the teacher of arts
and sciences that offered people the opportunity to survive and control not only natural
processes but also psychological processes (writing, mathematics, memory, etc.). Before
the creation and use of these cultural tools, people were weak natural beings. Humans
became cultural beings through the creation and use of a system of material and symbolic
tools. The creation and use of a system of cultural tools provided people with the means to
become as strong and smart as the gods. The awakening of critical consciousness calls into
question the foundations of the dominant regime. Zeus banished Prometheus to be eter-
nally clamped to a rock in the Caucuses, and every day, an eagle came and ate part of his
liver. Kratos (power) and Bia (violence) are the servants of the tyrannical regime of Zeus
who chained Prometheus to a rock (Aeschylus, 2012). Suffering is the ‘price’ in the strug-
gle for freedom. Simultaneously, as Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged, ‘freedom is won
by a struggle against suffering’ (Mieder, 2010, p.163).
It would be advisable to consider the etymology of the word ‘Prometheus’. It means
‘forethinker’ [pro- (before) + manthano (learning, thinking)] meaning ‘forethought’. Pro-
metheus had the opportunity to anticipate the future. Revealing the historicity of the dom-
inant regime of Zeus, Prometheus anticipated its end. Prometheus’s long-term pain and
suffering prepared the end of the tyranny of Zeus (Aeschylus, 2012). Prometheus’s abil-
ity to anticipate the future was a real danger to the regime of Zeus because it reveals the
temporality of oppression and the perspective of its overthrow. Prometheus’s suffering and
resistance is an optimistic tragedy that may inspire people in critical periods. The figure of
Prometheus as a metaphor reflects the human potential for emancipatory learning, radical
imagination and conscientisation in Paulo Freire’s terms.

Re‑imaging the Future and Changing the Present

Vygotsky’s project with its focus on a dialectic of change, becoming and proximal devel-
opment is a future-oriented theory. Reflecting backward and reflecting forward, travelling
back to the earlier stages of the history of culture and anticipating the future of the society
is a way to resist socio-cultural amnesia and radicalise scientific imagination (Dafermos,
2020). The development of creative imagination is especially important in times of crises
and unfinalised transitions.
The crisis has a temporal trajectory and a future orientation (Freeden, 2017). Forward-
looking reflection on the future is an essential dimension of the process of human emanci-
pation. ‘A holistic outline of an alternative society’ (Levitas, 2013, p.xiii) based on global
solidarity and cooperation is required in times of the contemporary ‘existential crisis’ for
the human species. ‘Τhe imaginary reconstitution of society’ (Levitas, 2013, p. xvii) is
the only way to cope with global challenges such as pandemics, global warming, massive

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Discussing the Concept of Crisis

storms and poverty. Re-imaging a possible world in which the free development of each
one is the precondition for the free development of all is necessary for resistance and radi-
cal social change. The future society will be a deep cultural, social transformation of all
human history rather than a simple negation of capitalism (Vaziulin, 1988). At the cross-
road of ecological and socio-economic crises, it is important to explore scientifically the
future society in positive terms rather than negative ones.
Ecological and socio-economic crises make change inevitable. The crucial questions
are: what is the direction, the orientation of this change? To what extent can the direc-
tion of this change be transformed? Crises are periods that require the creation of collec-
tive, collaborative spaces for critical reflection on action, for action, as well as the search
for new unpredictable paths and transitions from the future to the present and vice versa.
Going through and handling a crisis is often painful. Simultaneously, crises challenge the
existing conceptualisations and create conditions for the formulation of new theories that
allow people to orient themselves, make sense under adverse conditions and become crea-
tors of both their own lives and social history. The development of new, original theories
about society and its history is internally linked to changing societal conditions that cause
human suffering.
Going beyond the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives of ‘the end of the world’,
dialectical thinking reveals the contradictory coexistence of dying of the old social forms
and painful childbirth of new in terms of the optimistic tragedy of human history. Going
beyond agency/structure dualism, a dialectical way of thinking focuses on ‘the coincidence
of the changing of circumstances and human activity or self-changing’ (Marx, 2010a, p.4).
From a dialectical perspective, it is important to reveal both contradictory life conditions
and the perspective of their radical social change: ‘the human possibility of ending … suf-
fering by participating oneself in changing the conditions causing it’ (Holzkamp, 2013,
p.33). In the time of global crisis and the widespread dissemination of necropolitics, dia-
lectics provides the theoretical and methodological framework for the systematic investi-
gation of acute social contradictions and the revitalisation of the theory of society and its
history. Focusing on the vitality of contradictions and dialectics as a way of studying them,
Hegel (2010, p.382) argued that ‘contradiction is the root of all movement and life’.
A dialectical reflection on social contradictions is internally connected with active par-
ticipation in ‘collaborative transformative practices’ (Stetsenko, 2012, p.149). The adher-
ents of Practice Research tradition propose to ‘arrange co-operation between research and
practice in ways that inspire open and mutual exploration of contradictions in practice and
support joint exploration of how to change problematic conditions’ (Kousholt, 2016, p.
255). It is crucial to underline the enormous importance of carrying out interventions, col-
laborative projects with a future-oriented, transformative agenda for marginalised groups
in different countries and continents. Through active participation in these collaborative
projects, people learn and develop to transform the practices of their communities rather
than adapting to them (Sales et al., 2020; Vianna & Stetsenko, 2014; Sannino et al., 2021;
Liberali & Shimoura, 2018; Stetsenko, 2021; Leite et al., 2020).
People are forced to choose between adapting to the existing conditions and participat-
ing actively, collectively in their transformation. People may continue to internalise pas-
sively oppression and discrimination, but they can resist and fight for their freedom. Global
and local ongoing crises urge us to reflect upon meanings and life-orientation, find pos-
sibilities not realised yet and make crucial decisions. We often prefer, like ostriches, to put
our heads in the sand than to face potential threats, pressing problems, ‘conflictualities of
everyday living’ (Schraube, 2015) and acute crises.

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Conclusion

The term ‘crisis’ has a long history and connotes a variety of meanings across disciplines
and over time. Starting from medicine in Ancient Greece, this term was extrapolated to
political science, political economy, sociology and psychology in modernity. Highlighting
the non-linear character of the historical process, its ambiguity and contradictoriness, the
term ‘crisis’ is important for conceptualising modernity. Later, the concept of crisis has
been expanded to reflect growing fragmentation and heterogenous, fluid processes in the
postmodern condition.
By historicising the concept of crisis, dialectical thinking provides a fruitful method-
ological framework for discussing deep and urgent social and ecological problems. The
work of historicizing concepts and social practices invites a closer examination of the com-
plex, dynamic interplay of past- and future-oriented temporalities. The reconstruction of
temporality in times of crisis involves the possibility of rethinking the past, re-imaging the
future and changing the present (Dafermos, 2020).
The historicisation of the concept of crisis can help to appreciate the essential contribu-
tion of Vygotsky’s project to the history of human thought. Vygotsky used the concept of
crisis in two different ways in his writings. Firstly, this concept refers to the transitional
period of the contradictory co-existence between the destruction of old, previous, concepts
on the one hand and the emergence of new concepts on the other in the process of devel-
opment of psychology. Secondly, it is a critical period of the transition from one age to
another as a result of dramatic internal conflicts. For Vygotsky, the concept of crisis is a
part of a conceptual system for a dialectical reflection of the contradictory developmental
process rather than a detached concept.
There is a growing awareness in contemporary cultural-historical activity research that
it is necessary to expand the concept of crisis beyond the boundaries of psychology as a
discipline. The elaboration of the concept of crisis as a part of broader social theory is one
of the most important priorities for cultural-historical activity research. From my perspec-
tive, a systematic reflection on social contradictions and their dynamics can become the
core of a dialectically oriented social theory.
To be honest, we must recognise that Vygotsky’s conceptualization of the crisis is
incomplete and unfinalised. Future research should focus on the following questions: Is the
crisis a necessary moment in the developmental process or a problematic situation that can
be avoided? Is the transition from one stage of development to another gradual or abrupt?
Ηow long does the crisis last? How are social crises connected with personal crises? How
to go through a series of social crises where one triggers the others? How do people deal
with societal and personal crises during their life course? How do personalities develop
in various socio-historical and cultural contexts in the contemporary global and deeply
divided world?
Living in hard times and going through crises allow us to reveal a harsh reality and
to look for new ways of critical reflection and active, transformative participation in the
world. In challenging times, decisive action and a change of practices are required more
than ever. Revolutionising research and changing practices was the main idea of the key-
note address of Lave (2012) given at the ISCAR Congress in Rome. This critical agenda
for cultural-historical activity research still remains relevant.
In conclusion, I want to mention the words of the Greek poet Nikos Κavvadias ‘dance
on the shark’s wing’. In other words, the poet invites us to overcome the fear of failure and
make the impossible possible. Dancing on the shark’s wing through resisting the adverse

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Discussing the Concept of Crisis

conditions in times of social fragmentation and the dominance of necropolitics, zombie

economics and zombie science is crucial to regenerate cultural-historical activity research,
develop creative transformative activity at the international, national and local levels and
transform the ‘dance of death’ into a dance of life.

Acknowledgements I would to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments, which enabled me to
improve the quality of the manuscript.

Author Contribution All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.

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