[Xmca-l] xmca new discussion started

[川床靖子]

Dear xmca members,

Thank you very much for putting my article under discussion at xmca.

Let me introduce my research career briefly.

Until the 2000s, I had done some research in company’s workplaces or institutionalized systems where some “strategy” called by Michel de Certeau (1984) could work, and investigated the ways of relations among individuals, artifacts and machineries in those spaces: the practice of repair technicians in a copy machine company, the practice of operators under the introduction of new production system (Toyota Production System) in the US manufacturing company, and the technology of a care needs assessment under the nursing-care insurance system in Japan.

After that, I have been interested in everyday practices by ordinary people, especially women and old people who live in farm villages or small towns in Japan. In everyday practices that are “tactical in character”, people “make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules”, referring to Michel de Certeau (1984). I have tried to explore, and described vividly ordinary people’s tactics, more specifically, the procedures, bases, effects, and possibilities of those collective activities. For example, the practice of old women who were engaged in a “happa (leaf) business” in a mountain village, and the practice of women weavers group with the objective of developing traditional hand-weaving skills and sharing Matsusaka cotton with the next generation (current issue).

I think I am a type of researcher who takes pleasure in walking around here and there in search of interesting humans collective activities. The important thing for me is how vividly I can describe interactions among people, artifacts, and machinery that I find interesting in the places. For the sake of cultivating more fruitful viewpoints in the field, I might need some more theoretical bases that I lack unfortunately. 

I hope I have your many productive suggestions to our works.

Yasuko Kawatoko