[Xmca-l] Re: XMCA discourse

[Helena Worthen]

Thank you, Mike.

Helena

Helena Worthen
helenaworthen@gmail.com

On Oct 12, 2014, at 9:40 AM, mike cole wrote:

> :-)
> 
> typical of me to type as sloppily as I think. To continue, for the moment.
> 
> As my recent posts have indicated, i have been concerned that the
> conversations were
> becoming so difficult to follow that it was becoming very difficult for me
> to follow what people were trying to say. The discussion with Paul is
> exemplary in this regard. We were drawing on such different domains of
> scholarship, with such very different experiences and personal projects,
> that I struggled to find a common object to focus on. with not much
> success. I suggested that perhaps we were simply confused because we were
> drawing upon disjunct (for our group, at least) discourses and could not
> translate usefully across them for each other.
> 
> Where XMCA discussions have recently been most interesting to me is when we
> pick a common article that is published in MCA to discuss *and the
> author(s) engage in discussion about the article with us readers. * That
> was the original idea of XMCA -- to allow authors to get lots of feedback
> quickly so that we did not end up with 3 year delays in next turns in a
> discussion that is supposed to be relevant to current professional concerns
> and be relevant to our actions.
> 
> By picking the two articles that I suggested for conversation --
> 1. LSV on perezhivanie as a unit of analysis for understanding the role of
> the environment with respect to development of persons (I really think it
> helps to substitute person or personhood for personality as the Russian
> term, lichnost, is used in these conversations)
> 2. AN Leontiev's (ANL) 1936(?) critique of LSV's views on perezhivanie.
> 
> I selected these two article for several reasons.
> 
> 1. There is an ongoing discussion with Russian psychologists on Facebook
> about key concepts and their confusions, with perezhivanie a topic for some
> 6 months.
> 2. From this discussion, I have learned about divergences between LSV and
> ANL that have a strong bearing on the degree on the overall relationship
> between the cultural-historical (LSV) and AT (ANL) halves of CHAT.
> 3. David Ke's note about this article talks about units of analysis not
> only for emotion/cognition but thought/word/meaning (as i recall, I cannot
> find that message either!), so i thought it would amp our understanding of
> how the term is being used and why and to what effect.
> 
> This is an unsupervised discussion forum. Anyone can join and in a long
> history, there are very occasions when one gets the feeling that someone is
> there simply to make life miserable for others.... to the contrary...
> people try to be helpful if/when they can. I personally have no interest in
> sifting through notes as gatekeeper for the group.
> 
> So, I will follow the lead of Holly, Katie, Rod, Andy and others overnight
> and suggest that we try out a close reading of the two, competing, article
> on perezhivanie. Everyone has downloadable access to the articles.
> 
> In addition, I am going to attach a cut and paste summary of some
> highlights I gleaned from the LSV article. It reflects my own reading and
> concerns and the formatting in not consistent. But at least for those who
> have not read the article and have too many papers to grade or lessons to
> prepare, it might be a help "leg up" in following the conversation, if
> there is one.
> 
> I would welcome others taking my half-baked summary-cum-cut/paste/comment
> and filling it out, but keeping it brief. We could post those on the xmca
> page for future reference.
> 
> I have some doubts of my own about some of LSV's ideas here, before taking
> on ANL's critique and later Andy's essay about all of this and other
> comments. But enough for this morning. Now back to my local life world.
> 
> mike
> 
> 
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 9:15 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Dear Colleagues-
>> 
>> For some time now, I have been uncertain about how best, or even whether
>> to continue, xmca discussions.
>> 
>> --
>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
> <lsv.envir.mike.doc>