Reconceptualization as a Tool of Critical Practice

Abstract

We gladly announce the latest Outlines issue! As expected for a journal devoted to critical practice studies, this issue brings up themes linked to the necessity of overcoming the status quo. Though the articles published herein cover a wide array of research topics, all of them insightfully engage with the issue of the commitment to knowledge production, especially within cultural-historical approaches, as a tool of social transformation and emancipation. The authors' critical engagement with knowledge production pivots on the principle of reconceptualization as a tool of critical research and scholarship. As a reconfiguration of social cultural patterns, reconceptualization permeates the articles in this issue not as mere academic exercise, but as a tool to reimagine and build new possible futures through critical frameworks. In this historical and dialectical reading, inspired by Stetsenko (2019), reconceptualization goes beyond deconstructing the present and past to offer forward-looking, radical solutions to our challenges. This is clearly articulated in the article by Prior and colleagues, who begin with an ethico-onto-epistemological transdisciplinary stance (Barad, 2007) attuned to historical becoming and aligned with the long-standing Vygotskyan linkage of theory, methodology, and social action. According to them, ethico-onto-epistemological frameworks (e.g., Mainardes, 2022;Stetsenko, 2020) "have articulated the integration of being-doing-knowing, the centrality of socio-political ethos to projects of knowing, and the importance of foregrounding social consequences and visions in the design, implementation, and uptake of inquiry" (this issue, p. 14).