Moving beyond the Relational Worldview: Exploring the Next Steps Premised on Agency and a Commitment to Social Change Commentary on Karimi-Aghdam

I enthusiastically welcome the paper by Saeed Karimi-Aghdam [2016] for many reasons, but especially because it makes an important contribution to and serves to invigorate debates about theoretical and, more broadly, philosophical underpinnings of our contemporary approaches to human development, with crucial implications for applied fields including education. Such debates are sorely needed today as psychology continues to vacillate between the extremes of biologically deterministic views that reduce human development to processes inside the organism (and, increasingly, more narrowly inside the brain) on the one hand and those views that focus on development as a process that is distributed in and shaped by sociocultural forces without due attention to individual dynamics such as the development of the mind, self-regulation, motivation, and the self on the other. This vacillation and the accompanying painful ruptures in the approaches and disciplines concerned with human development need to be considered within the context of the “end of theory” climate – expressed for example, in the desire to deprivilege the “grand narratives” of the past – as this climate has gradually settled in psychology and other fields over several decades and even intensified in recent years. The recent dynamics are especially driven by appeals to the “evidence-based” approaches with their empirically oriented methodologies under the banner that we need to know the “facts” about development without much consideration of how these facts are enmeshed and embedded within wider theoretical and sociopolitical contexts. Alternatively, these recent dynamics are related to appeals to focus on positionality and provisionality of knowledge whereby the priority is given to localized investigations (e.g., in attunement with specific contexts and circumstances), also without much concern for theoretical and philosophical vicissitudes of knowledge production. Whether championed by mainstream ap-