Re: AERA SIG themes, speakers

From: Yrjö Engestrm (yrjo.engestrom@helsinki.fi)
Date: Thu Jul 04 2002 - 00:07:54 PDT


I strongly endorse Jay's suggestion. Dottie Holland is an excellent choice!

Yrjo Engestrom

> [This is a contribution to the CHAT-SIG discussion on themes for the next
> AERA .... a nominated theme was identities and subjectivities in CHAT and
> a possible speaker being considered is Dorothy Holland ...]
>
>
>
> I looked a bit into Dorothy Holland's work (of course I've come across it
> in the past, but not the recent work) at:
>
> http://www.unc.edu/depts/anthro/faculty/fac_pages/holland.html
>
> where she describes:
>
> Present Research: My theoretical interests revolve around identity, agency
> and social change, particularly social movements. Several colleagues and I
> have just published Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (1998, Harvard),
> a book, which along with a co-edited volume, History in Person: Enduring
> Struggles and the Practice of Identity (2001, School of American Research
> Press), articulates a social practice theory of identity. Two previous
> co-edited volumes, The Cultural Production of the Educated Person (1996,
> SUNY) and Selves in Time and Place: Identities, Experience and History in
> Nepal (1998, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) pursue similar issues in
> relation to education and in Nepali studies.
> The above projects, "Estrangement from the Public Sphere," and the study of
> the U.S. environmental movement, are large, collaborative ventures. Both
> projects investigate the new conditions for political and cultural activism
> and the importance of environmental issues in the public sphere. They also
> ask how social movements inhabit people's lives, becoming not only viable
> communities of practice but enduring cultural forms of desire.
>
> Not too much of this directly deals with education, but perhaps that would
> offer a useful counterpoint at AERA. Though among her writings there are:
>
> Levinson, B., D. Foley and D. Holland, eds. (1996). The Cultural Production
> of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local
> Practice. (State University of New York Press)
>
> Holland, D. and M. Eisenhart. (1990) Educated in Romance: Women,
> Achievement, and College Culture. (The University of Chicago Press)
>
> Interesting also is the theoretical work growing out of this, from
> Holland, D. and M. Cole (1995) Between Discourse and Schema:
> Reformulating a Cultural-Historical Approach to Culture and Mind.
> Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26(4):1-16.
> to
> Holland, D., and J. Lave (2001), eds. History in Person: Enduring
> Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities (The School of
> American Research Press)
>
> I would also be very happy to listen to Deborah Hicks talk about the fits
> and misfits between her work on Bakhtin and CHAT approaches.
>
> I had the feeling at ISCRAT that a lot of people, especially younger
> researchers, want to hear some CRITIQUE of classic CHAT approaches and some
> sense of WHAT ELSE we should be looking at and how to add it to, modify,
> transform, transgress from the models that are now dominant to those that
> will come next .....
>
> I think that many people in the field believe that issues of identity,
> subjectivities, and their dialogical construction within
> culturally-historically specific activities, as well as their
> transformative potential for such activities, for culture and for history,
> are important areas to talk about more in a CHAT context. Seeing identities
> as relational invokes the activities, the inter-linked different
> activities, across which our interactions with various partners, in various
> roles, make us the persons who act in these activities as we do. The
> trajectories of individual lives, and group biographies, weave connections
> across activity types and sites, sometimes in new ways that play a role in
> sociogenesis, cultural change, and history.
>
> I was particularly fascinated by a brief mention previously of focusing on
> atypical life-trajectories, the role of the transgressive in making change.
>
> Whoever has interesting things to say on these matters is who I'd like to
> hear talking in Chicago ....
>
> JAY.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------
>
>



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