CHAT for Change: Commoning for Vital Objects

Thematic Section Coordinators

Introduction

This thematic section brings together an international collective committed to advancing CHAT’s capacity to address large-scale societal transformation. Across domains including education reform, industrial redesign, worker health, sustainable agriculture, health, and public-sector innovation, participants identified a shared need to extend formative intervention traditions toward more durable, cross-sector forms of collective transformative agency. We also recognise the need to identify and learn from existing innovations that constitute viable alternatives to the bounded, individualised, competitive, and endless-growth logics of neoliberalism and capitalism. The initiative originated at the CHAT for Change gathering at University West in Trollhättan in February 2026.

Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) has provided powerful conceptual tools for analyzing learning, work, and development within and across activity systems. However, contemporary societal conditions, marked by ecological precarity, democratic strain, technological restructuring, and the erosion of welfare infrastructure, pose challenges that exceed the scope of frameworks primarily centered on bounded systems. 

A unifying feature of the CHAT for Change thematic section is its extensive experience conducting formative interventions such as Change Laboratories, Learning Labs, and related designs across diverse societal sectors. Building on this foundation, the collective is advancing the concept of commoning, collective practices through which communities create, govern, and sustain shared resources, as a complementary lens for understanding transformative agency. Processes of commoning foreground forms of collective stewardship, relational accountability, and distributed responsibility that often exceed the boundaries of single activity systems. Integrating commoning into CHAT expands the analytical focus from the transformation of discrete systems toward the ongoing coordination and care work required to sustain vital societal infrastructures. 

This thematic section will consolidate and extend this agenda within ISCAR by advancing conceptual, methodological, and empirical work on transformative change across interconnected activity systems.

Objectives

The thematic section aims to

  • Advance CHAT for societal-scale transformation beyond single activity systems
  • Develop conceptual tools for runaway and vital objects
  • Conceptualise commoning from a distinctive CHAT perspective
  • Elaborate multi-level learning processes, including Learning IV (Bateson, 1987)
  • Extend and innovate formative intervention methodologies
  • Promote methodological advancement in historical and archival work linked to enacted utopias and instances that embody commoning
  • Build a global cross-sector CHAT for Change community
  • Strengthen CHAT’s contribution to sustainability and democratic futures

Rationale

Across national contexts, educational systems, labor arrangements, public services, and democratic institutions are experiencing deep and interconnected crises. These are manifestations of historically accumulated contradictions that undermine the collective capacity to respond to runaway societal challenges such as climate instability, widening inequality, and institutional fragmentation.

While CHAT has generated rich analyses of local transformation, the field now faces the task of strengthening its capacity to address:

  • multi-level societal dynamics
  • cross-system coordination
  • consolidation and scaling of transformation
  • politically contested and rapidly evolving objects

Building on the trajectory from mediated action to activity systems and networks, the CHAT for Change initiative proposes an expansion toward vitality through commoning, the coordinated activity of interdependent systems necessary to sustain life and social reproduction. 

Vital activities focus on production, but not in a narrow sense. "Such universal vital activity includes not only material production of the means of survival, that is, everything necessary for the physical survival of humanity, but also the spiritual and mental production of ideas

(philosophical, scientific, artistic and religious) and psychological and educational production of the produces themselves - human beings, individuals” (Suvorov, 2003, p 69).

Thus, this thematic section concerns diverse aspects of life, including work, education, aesthetics, and spirituality. 

Interventionist Foundations of the Initiative

Unlike purely analytical research programs, the CHAT for Change initiative is grounded in decades of formative intervention work. Members of the collective have designed and implemented Change Laboratories, Learning Labs, and related approaches across

  • K–12 and higher education transformation
  • industrial and engineering work redesign
  • occupational health and worker well-being
  • sustainable agriculture and rural development
  • public-sector service innovation

This accumulated experience demonstrates the generative power of formative interventions while also revealing their current limits. While Change Laboratories and Learning Labs have enabled robust local transformations, the field now confronts the challenge of infrastructuring change, designing durable socio-material and organizational arrangements that allow transformations to travel, stabilize, and scale across institutional boundaries.

Participants at the Trollhättan gathering, therefore, identified an urgent need to advance formative interventions toward:

  • multi-site and multi-sector coordination
  • long-term consolidation of expansive transformations
  • engagement with runaway objects and vital societal objects
  • sustained coalition-building across institutional boundaries

The proposed thematic section provides an intellectual and organizational platform for this next generation of CHAT research and practice.

Activities

The thematic section will pursue its objectives through:

Conceptual development

  • Thematic symposia at ISCAR congresses
  • Theory-building workshops
  • Cross-tradition dialogues

Methodological innovation

  • Exchanges on next-generation formative interventions
  • Development of tools for studying traveling contradictions
  • Work on scaling and consolidation methodologies, including connecting formative interventions
  • Historical and archival work
  • Exploration of digital and AI-supported Change Laboratories

Empirical collaboration

  • International and comparative studies of transformative coalitions
  • Research on commoning and cooperative governance as viable alternatives to neoliberal and capitalist logics
  • Studies of human-centered agency in AI-mediated systems
  • Cross-sector projects linking education, work, and sustainability

Community and capacity building

  • Support for early-career scholars
  • International summer schools and courses
  • Collaborative data sessions and hangout weeks
  • Mentorship for formative intervention practice

Publications and visibility

  • Special issues and edited volumes
  • Practitioner-oriented outputs
  • Multimedia dissemination
  • Strengthening ISCAR communication spaces

Expected Outcomes

The thematic section will contribute to:

Theoretical advancement

  • Sharper conceptualization of runaway objects, commoning, and vital objects
  • Expanded theory of coalitions and multi-level agency
  • Development of Learning IV within CHAT
  • Stronger dialogue with allied critical traditions

Methodological innovation

  • Next-generation formative intervention frameworks
  • Tools for scaling, connection, and consolidation
  • Archival and historical methods aligned with CHAT principles
  • Digital and AI-enhanced intervention methods

Empirical impact

  • New studies of societal-scale transformation
  • Documentation of viable alternatives to systemic crises
  • Strengthened research–practice partnerships

Community strengthening

  • Increased global collaboration
  • Support for emerging scholars
  • Enhanced visibility of CHAT in societal debates

ISCAR is uniquely positioned at this historical juncture to catalyze the next phase of CHAT development. As global crises intensify and demands grow for research that can inform large-scale societal transformation, the field faces both an opportunity and a responsibility to extend its theoretical and methodological reach.

The CHAT for Change initiative emerges from a mature body of interventionist work and an expanding international network ready to engage these challenges. Establishing this thematic section now will enable ISCAR to:

  • consolidate emerging cross-sector work
  • support next-generation formative interventions
  • strengthen global collaboration
  • increase CHAT’s visibility in broader societal debates

By providing an institutional home for this agenda, ISCAR can play a pivotal role in advancing CHAT as a leading framework for understanding and shaping transformative change in the decades ahead.

Membership

The thematic section welcomes:

  • CHAT scholars across generations
  • Researchers in education, work, sustainability, and social movements
  • Practitioners engaged in formative interventions
  • Doctoral and early-career researchers
  • Interdisciplinary collaborators aligned with transformative agendas

We particularly encourage participation from scholars working in underrepresented regions and from those engaged in long-term interventionist research.