Re: in practice

From: Paul Dillon (dillonph@northcoast.com)
Date: Tue Dec 14 1999 - 14:31:08 PST


Mike,

You suggest that it would be useful if we told "how they imagine what we
write here connects with the specifics our of practice. " and "some brief
narrative concerning your
everyday professional practices where what you write about shapes what you
do."

It seems that I already did the second in my self-description (posted to
xmca july 5, 1999) but there are some other points.

1) On the basis of off-list responses i've received from other xmca-ites I
feel that what I write here helps further an appreciation for
dialectical-materialist and critical anthropological approaches among those
who haven't much familiarity with that material or those who haven't already
. . . This activity is an important part of what I consider to be my
practice. Insofar as xmca multilogue doesn't exclude rigorous questioning
of our different positions, I see this process of questioning to be an
important practice in and of itself. I mean when someone says "you chat and
i politic", etc. I think it's important to see how solid the ground is
beneath that statement. If it's solid I learn something and change. If not
perhaps others who were in doubt about the issue might better be able to
evaluate the consistency and coherence of the voice.

2) Recently, when preparing grant proposals for TIAPP and CTC centers to
the US Dept of Commerce and the US Dept of Ed I developed an analysis of the
"need" for those project monies in this area that focused on the
relationship between the traditional blue collar work culture and cyber
culture that has served to provide a common topical framework for the
collaborating organizations up here. We didn't get funded in the last round
(it seems that only the big name orgs got the money provoking cries of
"foul" throughout the grass roots CTC movement) but we continue to work
toward developing our project of public access, interlinked broad-bandwidth
multimedia internet centers. The groups being considered for the training
programs we will include in the project have been identified in large part
being developed on the basis of the concept i developed concerning working
class attitudes toward education (a la Learning to Labor). Since I will be
directing the evaluation component of this project, the activity theoretic
approaches (linked beyojnd the CTC itslef into neighborhood, school and
workplace) will figure prominently when we get moving. Hopefully we'll have
a small seed CTC up and running by spring since some limited funds did come
through from other sources.

3) With another hat I wear I've been doing longitudinal student tracking
and have developed an approach that I call "student pathway analysis"
(papers given on this at AERA in Montreal and CAIR in Sacramento this year)
that has benefited from Ilyenkov's concept of concrete universals. Since
the audience for this work (community college researchers primarily) is not
a theoretically inclined audience (they tend to like the new quantitative
frameworks it provides) I haven't really written anything to show why I
think that the concept of student pathway falls into the framework of
dialectical theory. It seems that this might be a good thing to do.

Political practice (not just political talk) has been a constant in my life
for 35 years ranging from my participation in the civil rights movement of
the 1960s in Los Angeles and Alabama, the I-O draft status I gained in 1965,
5 years as an anti-war activist, a return to formal education that resulted
in several years of living in peasant villages in the central Andes,
followed by additional years of working on rural development projects, to my
continued attempts to work in ways useful to disenfranchised people in the
U.S., as described above. In I think it is important part of my practice as
a politically committed radical intellectual working outside the pleasant
gardens of american academia to pull the veil of post-modernist
irrationalism where I find it since, as Habermas made so clear in "The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity", it is a very reactionary, though
very sedutive, voice.

Paul H. Dillon



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