Anna, I'm glad to hear this.
I actually think it's a matter of time and the main thing is to keep going. Not
that my immediate department is ever going to change, but that the tide will
turn in the whole field. Industrial relations has a lot of other troubles right
now; it's the field that takes "our system of collective bargaining" to be a
permanent feature of US society, while in fact the unionized sector is down to
10% or less and struggling. The lack of theory doesn't seem to be the most
urgent problem to most people.
In other fields, AT may have a clearer path. Anna, is your student in
psychology? I used sociolcultural theory in my dissertation in education and
had no problems at all. (But on the other hand, Eric, if your advisor is dead
set against it, I would pick a different framework and get past him, get the
thing signed and get out of there. The balance of power in a grad student -
advisor relationship does not lend itself to the grad student being able to
both get the thing written AND educate the advisor at the same time.)
I had a lucky encounter last night, though. The AFL CIO put on a "Town Hall
Meeting" at Roosevelt University, with John Sweeney (AFL CIO President), Jesse
Jackson, a bunch of Chicago labor luminaries, and 3 ex-Enron employees and 1
ex-Anderson employees. That was a story in itself! But in the crowd I
recognized the face of one of the two editors of our journal (this is actually
in response to Mike asking "What can we do?"). He was in Chicago for another
conference and had dropped in on this meeting. I snagged him to go to dinner,
and we sat outside on Michigan Avenue at that funny run-down old nice place,
the Cafe Des Artistes. To make a long story short, he argued for doing
something that would serve both his and my goals -- getting good stuff into the
journal, making my perspective (AT) less exotic: namely, getting some Canadians
(who seem to have heard of AT) to submit articles to the journal. SO that will
be my next step.
Bill -- regarding the totally non-union, non-tenured institutions that are
cropping up -- yes. A third alternative would be "just cause discharge" for
everyone.
Thanks for everyone's comments.
Helena
"Stetsenko, Anna" wrote:
> > review letters, and if my 'academic identity" has "Activity Theory"
> > connected with it, I will be regarded as a flake and will fail to get
> tenure.
> >
>
> That the situation can be like this is very troubling indeed. However, it is
> luckily not a uniform reality. A student from our program who wrote a
> dissertation in the AT framework has just been interviewed for a position at
> one of the best departments in this country, selected among only few from a
> pool of more than a 100 applicants - precisely (though not only) because her
> dissertation was written within a CHAT framework.
> I hope this example to the conrary of what Helena had described would
> reassure those students working within AT and reading messages on this list.
> Anna
> -----------------
> Anna Stetsenko, PhD
> Professor and Program Head
> PhD Program in Developmental Psychology
> Graduate Center, City University of New York
> 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 27 2002 - 08:02:50 PDT