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Prior research suggests that human children lack an aptitude for tool innovation. However, children's tool making must be explored across a broader range of tasks and across diverse cultural contexts before we can conclude that they are genuinely poor tool innovators. To this end, we investigated children's ability to independently construct 3 new tools using distinct actions: adding, subtracting, and reshaping. We tested 422 children across a broad age range from 5 geographic locations across South Africa (N = 126), Vanuatu (N = 190), and Australia (N = 106), which varied in their levels of exposure to Westernized culture. Children were shown a horizontal, transparent tube that had a sticker in its middle. Children were sequentially given each incomplete tool, which when accurately constructed could be used to push the sticker out of the tube. As predicted, older children were better at performing the innovation tasks than younger children across all cultures and innovation actions. We also found evidence for cultural variation: While all non-Western groups performed similarly, the Western group of children innovated at higher rates. However, children who did not innovate often adopted alternate methods when using the tools that also led to success. This suggests that children's innovation levels are influenced by the cultural environment, and highlights the flexibility inherent in human children's tool use.

This article theorizes the role of local and indigenous culture in its intersection with development initiatives. It argues that Communication for Development and Social Change (CDSC), through a cultural studies framework, strengthens the potentiality of democratization and participation within community-based development and social change settings. We advocate that applied cultural studies can facilitate agency (through voice and self-representation) in social interventions. This is a cultural studies approach that has been recontextualised from the Birmingham origin as read through Marxist development studies, first adapted and mobilized during the anti-apartheid struggle in developing cultural strategy, and more recently with efforts to indigenise research practices with research participants in the southern Kalahari. We draw on an example of the community-owned, state-funded, and privately operated !Xaus Lodge cultural tourism asset. We illustrate how CDSC strategies, influenced by applied cultural studies, can work with an agentic imperative to effect development and mutual understanding in a defined geographical area, where multiple stakeholder agendas, cultural backgrounds, and ontologies are to be negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined future-oriented behavior in children (3-6 years; N = 193) from three diverse societies--one industrialized Western city and two small, geographically isolated communities. Children had the opportunity to prepare for two alternative versions of an immediate future event over six trials. Some 3-year-olds from all cultures demonstrated competence, and a majority of the oldest children from each culture prepared for both future possibilities on every trial. Although there were some cultural differences in the youngest age groups that approached ceiling performance, the overall results indicate that children across these communities become able to prepare for alternative futures during early childhood. This acquisition period is therefore not contingent on Western upbringing, and may instead indicate normal cognitive maturation.

This study explored how overimitation and collaboration interact in 3- to 6-year-old children in Westernized (N = 48 in Experiment 1; N = 26 in Experiment 2) and Indigenous Australian communities (N = 26 in Experiment 2). Whether working in pairs or on their own rates of overimitation did not differ. However, when the causal functions of modeled actions were unclear, the Indigenous Australian children collaborated at enhanced rates compared to the Western children. When the causal role of witnessed actions was identifiable, collaboration rates were correlated with production of causally unnecessary actions, but in the Indigenous Australian children only. This study highlights how children employ imitation and collaboration when acquiring new skills and how the latter can be influenced by task structure and cultural background.

A dynamic framework for debating diasporic African identity draws on Ntongela Masilela's work on the New African Movement. Linking the global to the local, the argument connects theorists who have applied similar dialectical arguments in other expressive sites as they try to make sense of their own cultural origins and subsequent diasporic nomadism. Drawing on the nomadic ideas of Teshome Gabriel, other travelling scholars engaged in pluriversal thinking were invited to respond to a developing analysis to help shape this article's outcome. The question facing such academic travellers is where do their bodies belong? And, how do these disparate bodies interact across spaces, races, continents and identities? Successful identities in the modern world are argued to be hybrid, fluid and diasporic, deriving from the original Kalahari San. Nomadism is the unifying metaphor in explaining cultural hybridity and identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the intellectual legacy left by the late literary historian, the well-travelled Ntongela Masilela, a hitherto under-studied cultural and literary scholar whose analytical significance skyrocketed soon after his death in 2020. Partly a biography, the analysis draws on, and assesses, the vast unpublished online archive he wrote and curated, in relation to his published works, lectures and the paradigmatic influences which he exposed to his contemporaries. The objective is to provide a historical context to Masilela's groundbreaking identification of the New African Movement and its contribution in shaping approaches to understanding contending historical processes that were playing out in the formation South Africa in 1910. The Movement occurred during a period that spanned the 1880s to the 1960s, when those whom Masilela identified as New Africans – litterateurs and intellectuals – were negotiating the trajectories of early modernity, especially as they were playing out in what was to become South Africa. Masilela's unfinished historical business is here contextualised, and his framework analysed in relation to the articles that follow in this volume that continue, develop and critique his unique approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]