The organizers of our upcoming 2025 conference at the University of Belgrade, Rethinking context as process when studying human development: Implications for theory, practice, and policy, promise to steer us away from “traditional views studying context as external and static”, as “external settings or arenas of development”. The invited speakers will invite us to consider alternatives that allow for more dynamic and interconnected conceptualizations of development.
Abstracts provided by the invited speakers suggest their work, although varied in specific focus (forced migration, student learning, violence prevention), is built on a common bedrock of contextualism, a broad, synthetic theory that roots thinking and knowing in the historic event. According to Stephen Pepper’s original formulation, the historic event isn’t some expired, bounded thing that happened in the past, but is an act, dynamically and dramatically alive in its present — alive in its context. Taking the historic event as a point of departure commits us to thinking about things in terms of verbs: making, moving, laughing, creating, solving, imagining, desiring. “These acts or events”, writes Pepper, “are all intrinsically complex, composed of interconnected activities with continuously changing patterns. They are like incidents in the plot of a novel or drama. They are literally the incidents of life.”
Come to Belgrade to hear and discuss how these ideas play out in the work of our invited speakers.
