Becoming a subject to oneself is a challenge. To make the task somewhat more meaningful, I have presented a narrative that builds on experiences that are likely to resonate with other scholars from the Global South. In the academic journey from separation to synthesis, I have had the good fortune of collaborating with scientists from young students to renowned scholars, to whom I owe immense gratitude. I chose to modify the given metaphor of a pillar to better suit my orientation both to my inner self and to the outside world.

I have always been interested in research that was relevant to real life and the real world. I was never interested in phenomena that were confined to behavior in a laboratory. My research ended up connecting not just with other people’s lives, but with my own life. That is, my research influenced my life; and my life influenced my research. The latter was evident in my research on the development of language and communication in children, chimpanzees, and bonobos. The former was evident in my COVID research where I drew upon my longitudinal study of a Maya community to realize during the pandemic – and empirically demonstrate – that parenting, child behavior, adult activities, and values in a rural subsistence ecology are quickly revived in modern human beings when such responses are needed to adapt to survival threat and a contraction of the social world. Those findings, in turn, have reinforced my focus on the dynamic interaction of social change, cultural evolution, and human development.

The Introduction provides an overview of our approach to behavioral regulation as grounded in the theoretical work of Vygotsky and other related social and cultural theorists. From our approach, regulatory processes emerge from relational and agential processes of engagement in the learning practices of local communities such as classrooms, after-school programs, or homes. These processes are continuously interwoven with a community2019s cultural and semiotic resources. By focusing on relational and agential processes of learners and their teachers and mentors, our approach moves beyond the more common focus on self-regulation to a focus on all forms of behavioral regulation including self-, other-, co-, and socially shared regulation as relational parts of a whole system of regulatory processes for gaining, maintaining, and displaying intellectual and social-emotional competencies in the lived world. We introduce four novel sociocultural lenses for observing and analyzing regulatory processes in context and include a brief description of topics covered in the following chapters.