Re: The survival of settings
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
Mon, 22 Sep 1997 19:41:10 -0500
Another source that might be of interest on the material-practice
connections of settings is Lucy Suchman's chapter in Cognition and
Communication at Work (and the following chapter by Goodwin and Goodwin on
the same site). In exploring the constitution of lived space in an airline
operations center, Suchman is weaving together the physical space and
equipment of the room, people's talk and nonverbal actions (especially gaze
and something like Kendon's f-formations), fairly durable though dynamic
workplace practices, and several different communication technologies
(telephones, radios, video monitoring). Texts don't figure in the
foregrounded analysis, but I suspect their presence on the participants'
desks and in their enculturation to the workplace. This partially
dispersed networked "setting" makes me think that, as Eva was suggesting,
settings are constituted by blends of the material and semiotic--not
physical spaces, but human places which are extended by the circulation of
texts (and other artifacts) as well as by other communication technologies.
If leading activity, which has often signified a set piece in a
developmental narrative (first play, then school), is made fluid, dynamic,
situated, embodied, and heterogeneous, would it be the equivalent of what
you had in mind Kevin as a leading setting?
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign