The Aztec butterfly “papalotl”, symbolizes the many transformations and spatial movements of the self. Butterflies, like humans, metamorphosis into new beings through the processes of migrations across space, ecologies, languages, national and political borders; much like the theory and research celebrated by ISCAR.

We are born, inhabit and create multiple worlds reflecting our biological, sociocultural, linguistic and interpersonal roots. We are both the subjects and objects of the ecologies that constitute our existence and conscious capacities as humans. We create and are created by our social and cultural institutions as well as our surroundings; mundane representations of our everyday world of discourses, actions and experiences.

ISCAR 2008 is a celebration of our cultural and historical roots and the potential for understanding the human condition and for mediating the challenges we face in creating the conditions for a peaceful and prosperous global community.  Thus, we select the butterfly as the congress logo as it symbolizes the magnificence and fragility of the world we seek to balance with our needs for respect, dignity, and harmony within and across social identities, cultures, languages, and national boundaries. ISCAR resists orthodoxy and celebrates variations of opinion, the old and the new, and what’s yet to come.  In particular, it creates the space for theorists, researchers and practitioners, whose work is rooted in Cultural Historical and Activity Theory tradition and other resonant traditions, to explore the limits and the potentials of human understanding.

ISCAR achieves its mission through the interarticulation of the questions members ask, the methods they employ and the practice they design on both theoretical and empirical planes. Theory frames the meaning of data and data instantiates the meaning of theory in a constant dialectic cycle that links to the understanding of social and cultural practice. At all levels ISCAR represents diversities that are interoperative, interdependent, and deeply grounded in our historical roots and the ability to perceive and act, building and transforming from these roots. In line with this vision, ISCAR 2008 foregrounds 3 thematic areas that reach across these principles and their interrelationships.

One of the strands ISCAR 2008 highlights is our understanding of the ecologies we inhabit that require us to represent and analyze human practices, and their development and potential across the lifespan, and increasingly, across geographic and regional organization of cultural activity affected by history and innovation. We live in an interconnected world where electronic media coupled with other forms of mediation creates instant interconnections and interdependencies between diverse peoples and forms of knowing, doing and identity. Inquiry into the multiple domains of reality, language, culture, education, age, disciplines, sexuality, ability, and human consciousness are among the great range of empirical and theoretical areas highlighted by ISCAR 2008

The second strand focuses on one of the most important tenets of cultural-historical and activity research as well as related approaches: the notion that human functioning is grounded in material ecologies and settings that both enable and constrain human activity at the same time that they are defined by it. Understanding the richness of contexts, complexities, challenges, and collaborations that take place within these ecologies and within the investigation itself is integral to the study of culture and activity. That is, attention to how the ecologies and properties of settings affect human activity and interaction requires attention to theoretical and empirical analyses of the particular practices and construction of meanings within and across the ecologies of the observer and the observed. The theories, research and practice of classrooms, community spaces, cultural practices, and the human mind itself form a second focus of ISCAR 2008’s perspective on learning, identity, ability, communication, subjectivity and consciousness.

Our third strand focuses on the dialectical relationship between theory and method that captures human functioning as the object of ISCAR’s theory, research and practice. Across developmental ecologies, the interplay between theory and method creates tensions and opportunities for formulating alternative visions of the human condition. This is especially true when we seek to capture how diversities among humans and approaches to understanding interact to represent views and resolutions to dilemmas and opportunities humans encounter.  Extensions and elaborations of theories and methods to study human activity give rise to multiplicities in our perceptions and use of theory and method that transpose these critical elements as one or the other.  ISCAR 2008 seeks to draw attention to the ways of elaborating, reformulating, and illuminating the relationship of theory to method.  Of central concern is the application of theory in the service of diversity, new communication technologies, and imaginary worlds in the social worlds of people living 21st Century ecologies.