[Xmca-l] Re: Foucault

[White, Phillip]

Tom, what you write about xmca being so fascinating is, i think, an accurate reflection of its initial vision.  Eve Ekeblad of Gothenburg, Sweden, has a small web site on xmca's history:

XLCHC came into being in 1984 as a medium for discussion of research on learning and development with a general concern for issues of education in modern technological societies and a special concern about the ways in which educational systems are a source of socially engendered social inequality. The "call letters" of this discussion group (to borrow terminology from another medium) indicate its initial goals. LCHC is the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, a research unit founded at the Rockefeller University in the early 1970's which moved to the University of California, San Diego in 1978. Until 1984, LCHC had an ethnically diverse faculty that conducted an active post-doctoral program in the use of comparative methods for studying culture and cognition with special interest in problems of learning and development in school and non-school settings. By 1984, two years into the Reagan-Bush era, we had lost virtually all of our minority group faculty, our research concerns were explicitly rejected by federal funding agencies, and we were denied post-doctoral funds on the grounds that there was insufficient minority group faculty. :-)
XLCHC was one response to this non-benign neglect. The "X" in the title had a dual significance: First, it was meant to provide a medium for continued interaction and cooperation by the many visitors and post-doctoral fellows with whom we had interacted in the past, that is, for "ex-LCHCers." Second, it was meant to provide a broadened constituency for discussion of the issues traditionally associated with the Laboratory by including scholars and graduate students from around the world who wished to participate.

i don't know if this description has been superseded or not.

i began to participate on this list in the early 1990's, and it can still be a painful crawl.

phillip


____________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Tom Richardson [tom.richardson3@googlemail.com]
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2014 10:52 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Foucault

Where's the 'Like' button?, Phillip -  so many of the threads on xmca are
fascinating, although I canoften only crwl paiinfully through the specific
'jargon'/register/vocabulary of any particular discipline / area

Tom (an intermittent interloper)

On 17 September 2014 02:53, White, Phillip <Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>
wrote:

>
> as you write, Martin, yes, they had similar descriptions of their work
>
> "Foucault came to describe his work overall as a "historical ontology of
> ourselves." Certainly both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were philosophers on
> ontology, and of history."
>
> the difference is, i believe, that Foucault identified with those peoples
> who have been marginalized: prisoners, those deemed mentally ill, and
> homosexuals.  he said that his writings were autobiography.  and i've come
> to understand my own work as a way of autobiography.  i've begun to think
> of theory as a way of autobiography.
>
> i believe that i recognize a great deal of autobiography performed here on
> xmca - just as one sees autobiography performed at a cocktail party.
> (that's a great metaphor!)
>
> p
>
>