Re: leander paper

From: Jay Lemke (jaylemke@umich.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 14:59:41 PDT


Mike's got us off to a running start here ... I'll hope that Kevin will
respond about his uses of terms and some of the larger issues, but I'll
throw in a couple of impressions on Mike questions from a reader's view.
When I get to my copy of the article in my office, I'll reply more in the
context of Kevin's particulars.

Space is big these days in the theory world. Lefebvre and David Harvey, to
mention just two of the most cited and influential. Bakhtin was there, of
course, with the "chronotope", and I've been thinking, as Kevin clearly has
also, that chronotopes have a lot to suggest about analyzing activity and
meaning.

What's big about space is that it's differentiated ... places are
different, what we do in them is different, places are furnished to afford
different kinds of activities, places are a kind of collective memory of
history. Places help in social reproduction. Places can be changed, new
places made, maybe new kinds of places made (virtual spaces online?).

But also what's big about space/place is that we move from one to another,
and in some senses can be in more than one at once (virtually, and in terms
of how a place means for us, and in terms of one space inside another,
etc.). More critically, we articulate or link or laminate different
spaces/places with each other, and so does our society. Spaces and places
have social relationships to each other as well as strictly geographical
relationships. The social geography of space is not necessarily fixed ...
the activities we engage in can create new sense of linkage and of relative
distance/nearness among spaces/places. And so thinking in terms of spatial
contexts can help us figure out something about how we integrate (or
don't!) various activities, and that includes how we use already existing
relations among places/spaces to help us articulate one activity with another.

So "polycontextuality" is about being in more than one place/space at a
time, or over the course of activity. I am interested in a notion I am
calling "traversals": our trajectories across institutional spaces/places/
contexts/genres discourses, etc. in the course of making meanings that we
make between or across these traditional sites of social meaning ... what
we make beyond what is ready-made for us.

"Laminate" is just a nice word, isn't it! :) My sense is that this
metaphor directs us to the layering of spaces/places/contexts, the sense in
which more than one is simultaneously present for us, as opposed to just
relationships or connections among places taken each separately.

I think we're all well aware of our participation in multiple activities on
multiple timescales, more or less simultaneously or at least all in a day.
And we know that some of these are well-articulated with each other, and
others are somewhat disjoint, and sometimes there are serendipitous
cross-overs we didn't expect but which turn out to matter. So we're also
interested in activity theory in getting a sense of how to describe and
account for "poly-activism" ... and hence the potential value of ways of
looking at such matters from the perspective of our articulations among
multiple places and spaces in and through which activities are conducted.

One final musing ... imagine a spatially homogeneous world ... where every
place was more or less like every other, where buildings consisted of
identical rooms, identically furnished, where there was no point in going
to the mountains or the sea because all landscapes looked the same ... How
diverse would we expect the activities and cultures of such a world to be?
And why is our world not that way? And what do we do that makes it more so
and less so? And what do we do that depends on what is specific within each
places? and what do we do that depends on moving across the differences
between one place and another?

JAY.

At 11:27 AM 7/7/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>I have now read Kevin Leander's article, "Polycontextual
>construction zones: mapping the expansion of schooled space
>and identity" several times, and do not feel I have by any
>means got it all straight in my head.
>
>As I understand it, there are several main messages:
>1. The existence of a school within a school and a project-based
>activity for that alternative school provides opportunities
>for expansive learning and transformation of identities in
>productive ways.
>
>2. It is important to keep simultaneous, spatially distinct
>"contexts" in mind in CHAT research in addition to temporal
>sequence.
>
>3. The productivity of interactions among simultaneously existing
>activities (polycontexts) arises in good measure from conflicts
>among them.
>
>4. There is a growing literature from historical/economic geography
>which articulates in important ways with current chat discourse
>and their integration should prove productive.
>
>(I am sure there are other main points, but these came out of
>my fingertips at the moment).
>
>
>In so far as I have correctly articulated these points, I fully
>agree with them and appreciated the detailed analyses of interactions
>and discussion of prior literature, not all of which I was/am
>familiar with. But I also have questions which relate to the
>way in which the theoretical/conceptual toolkit, which is very
>extensive, is deployed and the extent to which key terms are
>used consistently. And in some cases, I came away puzzled.
>
>I'll list a couple of puzzlements in hopes that Kevin and others
>will move in to help me out.
>
>1. Context and polycontextuality.
> I found Steve's analysis of object in Kristin's article where
>he was able to group uses of "object" partricularly help and would
>love to be able to do the same analysis here, starting with the
>term, context. We all know it is at least as polysemous as object
>and my guess it is used upwards of 100 times in this article. But
>its use seemed to me to wobble some, or else my interpretive
>system, which always wobbles (!) made it seem so (talk about
>problems relating subject and object!). Sometimes it appeared
>to be a spatial term in a non-relational sense, sometimes virtually
>synonymous with social space.
>
>So, social space is another term whose meaning, in distinction
>from other terms like activity and context, puzzled me.
>
>Consequently, I got tangled up from time to time in the use of thge
>term, polycontextualisty. In a regular high school isn't there
>polycontextuality associated with space all over? In the hallway,
>the bathroom, the badk of the classroom, the principal's office,
>etc.
>
>Laminate. What meaning is carried by laminate that is different
>from the word, "connect" when used for social systems?
>
>There are some questions for openers. I am still in the middle
>of Steve's interleaved victor/jay exchange, but now face 2 hours
>of meetings.
>
>So, off I go another part of campus.... or is that another
>activity system? Or, ugh, another context?
>
>Polysemously yours.
>mike

Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke



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