In the USA, Indigenous youth are punished more frequently and severely as compared to their White settler peers. Hyperpunishment of Indigenous youth should be understood in the cultural history of a settler-colonial nation. In this chapter, we present a formative intervention, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at an urban high school in Wisconsin through a coalition of an Anishinaabe Nation in Great Lakes, the state’s education agency, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, and a university-based research team. Indigenous Learning Lab including Anishinaabe youth, families, educators, and tribal government representatives and non-Indigenous school staff examined their existing system and designed a culturally responsive behavioral support system. In the following year, the team worked on the implementation of the new system. We utilized transformative agency by double stimulation with a decolonizing approach to facilitate the process. Our decolonizing approach was based on sovereignty and futurity and utilized funds of knowledge in Indigenous communities.

Studies of agency are crucial if we are to grapple with pressing societal and environmental problems. Relevant conceptual and methodological solutions are needed to make alternative futures possible. This chapter outlines a broad position from which the subsequent contributions to this edited volume depart: one that recognises the urgency of agency and the value of cultural-historical perspectives in breaking away from problematic notions that frame agency as a matter of individuals pitted against the social, or in which individual actions lose their social contingency. Elaborating agency as a matter of struggle where individual and social are in dialectic relations, the chapter focusses on motives, mediation and motion. Within a broader and still-evolving cultural-historical framework, these motifs offer a distinctive way to deal with the challenges of conceptualising and facilitating agency, one which brings alternative futures into the realm of the possible by linking agency with learning and development.

In the ‘future of work’ in particular and organizations more generally, the future is a ubiquitous companion and serves as a key point of orientation for actions. However, at the same time, the future is elusive, as its open-endedness undermines attempts to fully predict and ‘manage’, but also examine this temporal mode. In response to the intricate challenge of exploring the role of the future in organizations, we argue that practice theory can help us gain a deeper understanding of how organizational actors engage with the future. By revisiting key principles of practice theory and their relationships with time and the future, we propose to explore ‘future work’, i.e., the situationally enacted, performative, heterogeneous, and relationally entwined bundle of practices through which organizational actors engage with events that are to come. We conclude by discussing the implications of gaining a practice-based understanding of the future in organizations and suggest avenues for future research.

In this chapter, we discuss adolescence as a period of imaginative future-making, where identities are in flux and worked on, and self-consciousness enhanced. We draw on Vygotsky to argue that the conceptual thinking that marks adolescence enables them to closely analyze current realities, see connections they had not previously recognized, and grapple with complexities. These capabilities also allow adolescents to look beyond their immediate surroundings and become actively responsible citizens. Conceptual thinking therefore needs nurturing in environments that present meaningful challenges, offer the resources that can help young people tackle them and recognize the role of emotion in conceptual development. We explain how a relational approach can help young people with the development of identities that can engage them with what society offers. We also show how a relational pedagogy, including the use of digital resources, can sustain students as they tackle the curricular demands of high school, including subject matter knowledge. We point to the potential importance of families in supporting young people in the transition to adulthood and conclude by discussing efforts framed by cultural-historical understandings at supporting this transition for vulnerable young people.