Re: At a loss (Re: All the way with Piaget)

diane celia hodges (dchodges who-is-at interchg.ubc.ca)
Tue, 5 May 1998 12:54:57 -0700

At 12:12 AM 5/6/98, Naoki Ueno wrote:

>My starting place for this discussion is Donna Haraway's 'Situated Knowledges:

<snip>>
>We also don't want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms
>of Global Systems, but we do need an earthwide network of connections,
>including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very
>different - and power differentiated - communities. We need the power of
>modem critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order
>to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies
>that have a chance for a future (1 99 1, p. 187)."
>

*thank you* , Naoki, for bringing Haraway's article into this - and
you raise important readings from Haraway's passage -

crucially, I'd add
her emphasis on "meanings and bodies" as a key feature of
her work: in fact, this article is particularly interested

the dis/covering the "hegemony of the visual" - a methodology which
characterizes the bulk of Vyg & Piaget's "information"/"knowledge" -

and Haraway also discusses the biology of vision, as Bill Barowy
also has (thanks Bill), as another feature of what matters
when we think about "perspective" and "meanings and bodies"

as relations.

I think that yes, a global/earth-wide
inter-connected network of access to knowledges is

important, necessary, but such a network would need to be
interdisciplinary in its language - accountable for

biology, politics, economics, structures of systemic power and
social organizations, and accountable for the acts of oppression within
which researchers often participate (thanks Suzanne de Castel) -

such as the always suspicious desire for "universalization" of Western
ideas & practices....

diane

"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right." Ani Difranco
*********************************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction,
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada

snailmail: 3519 Hull Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V5N 4R8