The current lull in activity on xmca has given me a chance to catch-up once
again, after two weeks at in interesting summer institute in Denmark on new
directions for critical discourse analysis research. (I was arguing in my
main presentation that we need a more activity-centered unit of analysis,
the trajectories along which we make meanings and feelings in real time and
filled space.)
I was especially interested, from the discussion time here that I missed,
in Eugene's notes on Bakhtin and research method. This is also a theme that
Deborah Hicks has been exploring in some very interesting theoretical work
on Bakhtin's theory of "answerability" from his earlier writing. We
sometimes forget that B. was not just a sociocultural theorist of
polyphonic discourse, he was also profoundly concerned with issues of
personal moral conduct in interaction and dialogue. For him, dialogue
always has a moral dimension, our answerability for how we answer. I think
this is in some ways the root of his stance toward subjectivization and
does fit well, as Eugene proposes, with current research concerns, eg in
ethnography and also in education and sociology, about becoming partners
with our "research subjects" so that we do not, even inadvertently, turn
them into "objects" of our gaze and our discourse, which is dehumanizing
for them and for us, but also so that we do not create a misleading
discourse about them which says more about ourselves than about them,
though pretending the reverse. It is almost a lawful paradox in the human
sciences, I think, that the more we pretend to "objective" accounts of
others, the more we descend into our own unrecognized and uncritical
subjectivity.
I wonder if Deborah Hicks might be interested in leading a discussion on
these broad issues for the CHAT SIG at AERA?
Thanks, as often, to Eugene!
JAY.
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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