[Xmca-l] Youth and Vido Narrative Project

[mike cole]

Michael's quite reasonable question about the purposes of the folks seeking
information about cheap/free online facilities that engage
youth in video production, exposition, and reflective discussion incited me
to contact Morten Nissen, for whom the query was sent,
and ask if it would be ok for me to post his entire note to me.

I think that the project he is undertaking along with Catherine Hassa, a
LCHC alumna who comes to the project from a Social Studies of Science
perspective, will be of interest to many on xmca, even if youth and new
media is not your thing.

Morten has a very informative article in Andy's volume on Projects that I
think it would be great for XMCAers to discuss. It gave me a lot to think
about that has echoes of our discussion of the LSV/ANL discussion, but with
Morten articulating a critical perspective that puts
LSV under the microscope, along with communities of practice.

Anyway, here is the message Morten sent me. If its not of interest, BAIL!

mike

*Fra:* lchcmike@gmail.com [mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com] *På vegne af *mike
cole
*Sendt:* 22. januar 2015 18:31
*Til:* Morten Nissen
*Emne:* Re: Have you received MCA mail?



Nice to chat with you. hope you scored a goal! I will follow up.

mike



On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 8:59 AM, Morten Nissen <mn@edu.au.dk> wrote:

Dear Mike

Here’s a little bit on the theme of prototypical narratives. Attached is an
article to appear in  Dialogic Pedagogy that includes an argument for
Prototypical Narratives, but this should be read with my chapter in the
Blunden book, for our interest centers on artifacts, too – as you can see
also in the description of the PhD course with Emily Martin below.

As mentioned, I’ll talk with Cathrine and return about your nice idea of a
seminar.

Warmly,

Morten


Performing Beyond Representation, or: Prototypical Narratives - the stuff
(:artifacts) that dreams (:theories) are made ofPhD course with Emily
Martin, Morten Nissen, and Line Lerche Mørck



This course takes as its starting point the fact that we, as researchers,
increasingly are not only sampling data, but take part in producing
narratives as somehow prototypical, often involving ourselves in
unconventional ways, and carried by genres and model artifacts that we
barely understand or control (e.g. blogs or videos on shifting websites).



Why call this prototypical narratives? In the philosophy of language, a
prototype is a concrete exemplar that is used to represent a generality. In
the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition, this has been taken up
with a focus on how the exemplar is produced and handled as artifact in a
situated practice, and how its status as prototypical, or potentially
standard, is realized and reproduced in concrete networks of practices. The
narrative approach in the social sciences and humanities has highlighted
the sequential and contextual ordering of processes and events as
meaningful in existential and practical terms. By its logical form,
narrative proposes singular occurrences as meaningful and generally
relevant. Taken together, prototypical narratives are narratives that
designate certain meaningful processes, events and practices as
prototypical by capturing them in text, video, or other media, broadly with
a view to relevance for guiding and reflecting practice.

This fusion of narrativity and STS seems relevant since a) we are
increasingly required to provide concrete alternatives to the
empiricist-rationalist format of knowledge that is embodied in the
infrastructures of standardization through which practices are ruled, b)
the cultural genres of narrative performance and production evolve rapidly,
especially in terms of expanded technologies and challenges to the
private/public divisions, and this means that c) anyway we produce and use
model artifacts that take us well beyond what we can easily  handle
(ethically and methodologically) as 'data' in research or 'case materials'
in teaching.



This new situation requires us to reconceptualize classic issues such as

●      *Temporality*: The way we recreate the past to feed hopes for the
future is accelerating; historicity is overtaking any foundations;

●      *Reality*: With hyper-reality and reality TV, representation is no
longer secondary to its reference; we co-create the events we call in to
witness our stories;

●      *Performance*: Could it be that ‘citation’ of (e.g. gender or
disease) standards increasingly fuse with producing and transforming them?

●      *Subjectivity*: It is increasingly ourselves that we perform and
recreate, yet we tell of ourselves in forms that assume other objectivities
(such as those of drama, TV or art);

●      *Logic*: Beyond the academic text, who knows how research questions,
arguments or findings might look?

We have been pondering these ideas for a while, reflecting on the videos
and songs of former gang-members and drug users, ‘curating’ galleries, even
confessing our past on websites. We are now so privileged as to have
persuaded Emily Martin to help us understand it. Emily Martin is professor
of Anthropology at New York University, famous for feminist and science
studies, and deservedly praised for wonderful works such as *Bipolar
Expeditions *from 2009.



Besides academic presentations, the course will take up singular instances
of what could be called prototypical narratives from the research practices
and networks of teachers and students.



We suggest a 4 days course in the fall of 2015. The precise time will be
settled later.





*Morten Nissen*

PhD, Dr. Psych.

Professor

*Department of Education*

Aarhus University
Tuborgvej 164

2400 Copenhagen NV



Tlf: +45 30282418
www.edu.au.dk/

-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science as an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch.