[xmca] Back to the Future

From: Mary K. Bryson (mary.bryson@ubc.ca)
Date: Sun Oct 30 2005 - 07:31:42 PST


On 10/30/05 4:18 AM, "Phil Chappell" <philchappell@mac.com> wrote:

> But how else can an actor become more than a peripheral
> participant?

Lots to mull over following in the wake of an intervention that ruptured,
momentarily, the apparently seamless fabric of an "imagined community". This
moment of community reflexivity, concomittant, of course, with interventions
aimed at bringing everything back to the "good old days", in fact, speaks
to a core set of anxieties that could, potentially, lead to a rearticulation
of who can ³legitimately participate² in this community of practice. Folks
might productively re-read, if they haven¹t, Diane Hodge¹s MCA article,
since I think that it takes up in useful ways many of these tensions.

http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/DHodges.html
 Participation as Dis-Identification With/in a Community of Practice
by Diane Hodges
*The final version of this article can be found in Volume 5, Number 4 of the
XMCA Journal

In my subsequent post on Stetsenko I endeavored to de-personalize the
issues, which are, of course, not about individuals at all, and I am hoping
that there is more engagement with Stetsenko¹s work and what, in fact, her
project is engaging. It seems that sometimes in this community there is a
tendency for a reductive reading that is a kind of comparative practice of
identifying the extent to which folks agree with, or appear to contradict,
the canonical wisdom of the community¹s cherished historical artifacts ‹
which is a kind of reading that in some important ways allows for an
avoidance of taking on directly what it is that an/other voice is actually
producing by way of advancing knowledge in a particular direction.

So, in this group, I would argue that the community could open up
participation directly by actually taking up the scholarship of someone who
at present, is not being read as if she were, even potentially, a legitimate
central intellectual figure in the "front stage" of CHAT -- Stetsenko. And
what might it look like to read Stetsenko's work not just in terms of what
she has to say about Vygotsky +++ but about say, subjectivity and its
materiality. And if this is a theme that interests us all, or many of us,
then we could pick someone else who has written about this theme and
connected it to contemporary scholarship and not just historically
significant work, which is why I recommended N. Katherine Hayles On Becoming
Posthuman, which is all about subjectivity in contexts of world making where
we are always already cathected with artifacts. That's just one
recommendation. Nancy referred to Carol Lee, Marianne
Heiddegard, Kris Gutierrez.... Where do we want to go, by way of an
intellectual trajectory, here?

Can other voices speak in this space without being abjected? Let's get back
into Stetsenko and see where we end up. And if we want to really get into
Stetsenko's work, then I think we might want to add one more paper: The Self
in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Reclaiming the Unity of Social and
Individual Dimensions of Human Development
Anna Stetsenko and Igor M. Arievitch
Theory & Psychology, Vol. 14(4): 475­503

Mary
---------------
Mary K. Bryson, Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator, ECPS, Faculty
of Education, University of British Columbia
Research Profile http://www.ecps.educ.ubc.ca/research/mbryson.htm

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