Images of reversal twist through many folklore traditions, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king and condemning the powerful to ruin. For Mikhail Bakhtin, such reversals express the creative energy of "a carnival sense of the world." In carnival, laughter and excess push aside the seriousness and the hierarchies of "official" life. Carnival shakes up the authoritative version of language a...

In this paper, I want to explore how this claim relates to the concept of semiotic mediation in cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and the writings of the Bakhtin circle and then to consider how the theoretical framework that these scholars provide can be brought to bear, first on early language development, and then on the activity of education. I shall argue that the development of ch...

In this article, Compton-Lilly proposes that time acts as a constitutive dimension of people’s experiences that significantly affects the ways people make sense of their worlds. After briefly examining the ways time has been conceptualized in educational practice, she explores the temporal affordances of three highly influential theories described by Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Lemke. To illustrate ...