Esperançar (which means to act, to seek, to actively build), Esperançar in Latin America: Building Paths to Social Justice with Socio-Cultural-Historical Theory," the first ISCAR congress dedicated to Latin America, emerges as a space for meeting, dialogue, and collective knowledge-building and sharing committed to social transformation. Inspired by Freire's concept of esperançar and by the legacy of Lev S. Vygotsky and his collaborators, we invite everyone to think together about the challenges and possibilities of building education and psychology that are truly committed to social justice, equity, and the emancipation of Latin American peoples. 1st Circular

Thematic axes

Axis 1. Esperançar and Transformative Agency: Building the Unprecedented Viable in Education and Communities

This axis welcomes works that investigate processes of creating alternatives in contexts of inequality. It is particularly interested in how intervention research, critical collaborative research, and formative experiments — including those grounded in the genetic method of Cultural-Historical Theory — can foster collective agency to overcome what Paulo Freire called "limit-situations." Reflections on the role of schools, inclusive education, rural education, social movements, and non-school educational practices in building social and cognitive justice are welcome.

Axis 2. Teaching-Learning of School Subjects: Teacher Formation and Practice of Scientific Concepts, Mediation, and Development of Theoretical Thought

This axis welcomes empirical research (especially formative experiments and intervention research), theoretical studies, and literature reviews that investigate the teaching-learning of school subjects from the cultural-historical perspective. The aim is to strengthen the dialogue between Socio-Cultural-Historical Theory (SCHT) and the areas of Science Education, Mathematics Education, Geography Teaching, History Teaching, Sociology Teaching, etc., contributing to the construction of pedagogical practices that promote meaningful, critical, and socially relevant learning, capable of overcoming the gaps historically produced by inequality.

Axis 3. Temporalities, Technologies and (Dis)Alienation: Human Development in the Digital Age

In dialogue with ISCAR-Brazil's research on AI, this axis invites reflection on the impact of digital technologies and social acceleration on developmental processes. How do new technologies (including Artificial Intelligence) reconfigure teaching-learning relationships, intersubjectivity, and working conditions? What forms of alienation emerge, and how can the cultural-historical perspective help build critical algorithmic literacy and practices of digital resistance?

Axis 4. Interculturality, Decoloniality and Southern Epistemologies: The Dialogue of Knowledges in Socio-Cultural-Historical Research

This axis proposes a fundamental dialogue between the Vygotskian tradition and Latin American decolonial and intercultural thought. It seeks to investigate how the categories of the theory (such as mediation, activity, perezhivanie) can be enriched by encounters with the knowledges of Indigenous peoples, Quilombola communities, and Latin American traditions of struggle. How can we build research methodologies that are not extractivist, but that promote the co-existence of worldviews between different cultural and epistemic horizons?

Axis 5. Subjectivity, Learning and Lifelong Development

Based on the theoretical developments of González Rey and collaborators, this axis focuses on subjectivity as a cultural-historical production. Studies exploring subjective constitution in different spaces and moments of life (childhood, youth, adulthood) are welcome, investigating the complex relationships between learning, personal sense, emotion, and social context. Research on teacher education, professional development, and life trajectories in contexts of vulnerability is of particular interest.

Axis 6. Inclusive Education, Accessibility and Defectology: Social Compensation as a Path to Human Development

This thematic axis draws on Vygotsky's fundamental contributions in the field of defectology to think of inclusive education not as benevolence, but as an inalienable right. Vygotsky proposes a radical epistemological shift: instead of focusing on the "defect" as determination, we must understand it as a form of organization that opens original and creative pathways for development, through social compensation.

Axis 7. Cultural-Historical Psychology for the Transformation of Conditions of Existence: Foundations, Method and Praxis

In this axis, cultural-historical psychology is called upon to assume its insurgent and decolonial potential. In Latin America, this means placing it in dialogue with the struggles of Indigenous peoples, Quilombola communities, social movements, peripheries, and all those whose conditions of existence have been marked by exploitation and silencing. It means engaging the theory with the urgent issues of our time: climate crisis, authoritarianism, structural inequalities, precarious work, mental health, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Axis 8. Sport/Play, Art and Aesthetic Education: Praxis and Social Interaction as Tools for Inclusion and Transformation of Unequal Realities

This axis is based on the Vygotskian understanding that art and play share the same matrix: imagination as a cultural function that allows human beings to go beyond immediate experience, mobilize emotions, and create other possible worlds. But this axis also draws on authors who bring imagination into praxis and into the realization of actions that transform reality using Sport, not merely as a discipline, but as a powerful tool for social inclusion, individual transformation, personal growth, and integral formation. In Latin America, a territory of rich cultural diversity and historical struggles, sport, play, art, aesthetic education, and artistic practice assume fundamental political contours: they are forms of resistance against silencing, brutality, and cultural erasure; they are practices of re-existence that affirm identities, bodies, and ancestral knowledges; they are ways of actively hoping, building the unprecedented viable in contexts of inequality.

Axis 9. Educational Policies, Social Movements and Ethnic-Racial Relations Education in Latin America: tensions, resistances and disputes

In Latin America, educational policies have historically been permeated by structural inequalities of race, ethnicity, and class. Social movements, especially those of Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant and Quilombola communities, act as central political subjects in denouncing epistemic racism, femicide, misogyny, LGBTQIAPN+ communities, etc., and in proposing counter-hegemonic educational models. This research axis proposes to investigate how these actors challenge, influence, and (re)orient educational policies, creating disputes around the right to education, memory, and identity.

Axis 10: Activity Clinic and “Esperançar” in Work: Power to Act and Social Justice in Latin America

This axis aims to explore the contributions of the Activity Clinic (Yves Clot) to the construction of pathways toward social justice in the Latin American context. Based on the principle that work is a vital and central activity in the constitution of subjects, the proposal is to investigate how the methodologies developed by Clot and his collaborators - especially cross-self-confrontation and instruction to a double - can function as devices of “hope-action” in the labor world. We are interested in understanding how the expansion of the power to act of work collectives can contribute to confronting precariousness, illness, and alienation, promoting health, dignity, and social transformation. This axis welcomes research and interventions that articulate the concepts of the Activity Clinic with the concrete struggles of workers in Latin America.