Mind, Culture, and Activity

Hope, Healing, and Care in the Times of Dread: Enacted Utopias and Collective Futures

What is utopia for? Utopia is there on the horizon... It serves for: Never quit walking. — Eduardo Galeano (1994)

We invite contributions for a special issue of Mind, Culture, and Activity that explores how communities across the world enact hope, healing, and care as collective, transformative practices amid times of dread.

In a period marked by intensifying ecological, political, and social crises—from authoritarianism and displacement to systemic neglect and environmental collapse—communities continue to imagine and build otherwise. This issue seeks to understand utopia as collective praxis: how people organize, learn, and transform in pursuit of just, joyful, and sustainable futures.

We particularly welcome work that draws on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and related frameworks to illuminate collective learning, contradiction, and transformation across diverse cultural, social, and ecological contexts.

Theoretical and Conceptual Orientation

This special issue invites explorations of transformation as struggle within and against deepening social, political, and ecological crises. We bring CHAT into dialogue with feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic frameworks that foreground relationality, care, and ecological interdependence as foundations for social transformation. We invite both theoretical and practice-based engagements that foreground the interconnectedness of hope, healing, and collective agency.

Core Themes and Example Topics

We welcome contributions from all geographical regions, disciplines, and methodological traditions—including community-based, collaborative, and multimodal projects. Possible areas of focus include, but are not limited to:

● Hope as Praxis: Hope as an organized, collective activity of resistance and renewal grounded in solidarity.

● Enacted Utopias and Relational Imagination: How feminist, Indigenous, and grassroots collectives make the impossible feel possible through new social, ecological, and educational practices.

● Indigenous Cosmologies and Survival on a Damaged Planet: Land-based learning, language revitalization, sovereignty movements, and kinship epistemologies.

● Historicity and Social Movement Learning: Intergenerational knowledge-making in movements for justice, sustainability, and liberation.

● Futures Otherwise: Expansive learning, concept formation, and creative world-building across communities, navigating crisis and repair.

● Utopian methodology as a form of Design-Based Intervention Research that can guide the process of envisioning, implementing, sustaining, and critically evaluating alternative forms of activity systems.

We encourage submissions that cross boundaries of academia and community, including contributions from educators, youth, activists, and organizers, as well as academicians.

Inclusivity and Community Engagement

We warmly invite submissions from community organizations, practitioners, activists, educators, and scholars who are co-creating or documenting transformative projects in their local contexts.

We particularly encourage community-based research and participatory projects that exemplify learning and future-making “in the wild”—across schools, movements, collectives, and other spaces of struggle and imagination. Contributions from early-career researchers, youth activists, artists, and community collaborators from the Global South and historically marginalized communities are strongly encouraged.

About the Journal

Mind, Culture, and Activity is an international, interdisciplinary journal that publishes research examining human development, learning, and activity as historically situated and socially mediated processes. The journal welcomes contributions that integrate theory, empirical inquiry, and design and that advance critical, inclusive, and globally relevant perspectives on human activity and transformation.