the ethics and implications of bashing

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Sun, 25 Jan 1998 14:07:05 -0500

What does weaken our standing to criticize, and even our standing to
describe, is that we tend to propose criticisms/changes in institutions we
don't have to live in/with. Mark Clarke reminds us of all the ways
researcher-school relationships have failed over the years, and identifies
the reasons pretty clearly. He also provides the key to a solution: genuine
collaboration, in which it is a diverse team or
researcher-teacher-administrator collective that does the criticizing and
proposing. As I am beginning to conclude in my analyses of methodological
dilemmas in the human sciences generally (regarding issues of scale and
complexity), "it takes a village to study a village". What I don't yet
understand are the consequences of different kinds of possible
relationships between these villages (identity, subset, overlap, etc.).

Where are the parents, and especially the students, or their
representatives in the ecological collaborative that Mark describes? And
who else needs to be represented there?

Naoki's analysis of the role of boundary objects in the production of
institutions and communitues as networks of evolving practices is very
incisive. Where, he asks, are the concrete material and changeable forms
around which people in a community can interact so as to truly collaborate
in the production of emergent goals and strategies? What are the kinds of
mediational dynamic-objects (this is, by the way, what Latour appears to
really mean by 'actant' or 'actor' in ANT, much as Naoki describes the
dynamic AT "object", hence the similarity to Leigh Star's "boundary
object") that could involve all these different kinds of villagers in
either study, self-study, or learning (there could be differences, but also
not)?

Can the village itself be it own dynamical mediating object? I mean here
the full material village, in this case the school and all that happens
within it, as ecosocial system or network. I think this is possible,
although I obviously agree with Mark that the range of relevant scales in
such a system requires us to focus in on particular (usually scale-breaking
in my view) networks of constituent objects and practices. But the choice
of starting points, and the on-going choices about where to follow the
network connections via objects/actants to other practices, will depend on
the membership of the collaborative -- hence the importance of
representation for diversity. Students might have rather different
priorities than either teachers or administrators or researchers. Only by
following all the relevant pathways through the network can our accounts,
our critiques, and our proposals match the diversity of the system itself.

These networks of interdependent social practices obviously do not stop at
the schoolhouse door, nor respect the boundaries of any of our constructed
cultural categories of this sort (including scale-units) because they
obviously contain the very practices by which we construct them. (Here I
quite agree with some of Naoki earlier ethnomethodological criticisms of
the reification of macrosocial categories as natural kinds.) And this leads
to some very difficult dilemmas of theory and methodology, not just for
pragmatic improvement of educational practices in our community, but for
the conditions for obtaining useful (and always evolving) accounts of
what's going on (on which to base in part proposals for change). The
village you need to study a village may not have to be co-extensive with
the village itself, but it may need to be indefinitely extensible into the
ecosocial contexts of the village's practices. You never know when your
team is going to need an architect, or an economist, or a politician, or a
drug dealer. Latour's number one methodological principle is "follow the
actors" -- the question in practice is HOW?

Many people are talking these days about the affordances of communications
networks and new information technologies for creating flexible, extensible
online communities for "distributed" research projects on scales not
formerly possible or practical. Could this also perhaps be the basis for a
solution to the the methodological dilemmas I am concerned with? JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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