[Xmca-l] Re: Youth and Vido Narrative Project

[Greg Thompson]

Mike,
Norma Mendoza-Denton (UCLA) is doing some very interesting work studying
the platform of Youtube and the role of the videos and subsequent comments
on Latin@ gangsta rap videos and how they construct various kinds of
publics (and btw, I wouldn't be surprised if Youtube can't do everything
that Morten would like to do, but maybe not).

Here is a description of a presentation of Norma's work:
http://hrc.anu.edu.au/sites/hrc.anu.edu.au/files/u78/Mendoza-Denton%20flyer.pdf

Perhaps a bit too linguistic-y for this audience's tastes?
-greg

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 11:24 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Michael's quite reasonable question about the purposes of the folks seeking
> information about cheap/free online facilities that engage
> youth in video production, exposition, and reflective discussion incited me
> to contact Morten Nissen, for whom the query was sent,
> and ask if it would be ok for me to post his entire note to me.
>
> I think that the project he is undertaking along with Catherine Hassa, a
> LCHC alumna who comes to the project from a Social Studies of Science
> perspective, will be of interest to many on xmca, even if youth and new
> media is not your thing.
>
> Morten has a very informative article in Andy's volume on Projects that I
> think it would be great for XMCAers to discuss. It gave me a lot to think
> about that has echoes of our discussion of the LSV/ANL discussion, but with
> Morten articulating a critical perspective that puts
> LSV under the microscope, along with communities of practice.
>
> Anyway, here is the message Morten sent me. If its not of interest, BAIL!
>
> mike
>
> *Fra:* lchcmike@gmail.com [mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com] *På vegne af *mike
> cole
> *Sendt:* 22. januar 2015 18:31
> *Til:* Morten Nissen
> *Emne:* Re: Have you received MCA mail?
>
>
>
> Nice to chat with you. hope you scored a goal! I will follow up.
>
> mike
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 8:59 AM, Morten Nissen <mn@edu.au.dk> wrote:
>
> Dear Mike
>
> Here’s a little bit on the theme of prototypical narratives. Attached is an
> article to appear in  Dialogic Pedagogy that includes an argument for
> Prototypical Narratives, but this should be read with my chapter in the
> Blunden book, for our interest centers on artifacts, too – as you can see
> also in the description of the PhD course with Emily Martin below.
>
> As mentioned, I’ll talk with Cathrine and return about your nice idea of a
> seminar.
>
> Warmly,
>
> Morten
>
>
> Performing Beyond Representation, or: Prototypical Narratives - the stuff
> (:artifacts) that dreams (:theories) are made ofPhD course with Emily
> Martin, Morten Nissen, and Line Lerche Mørck
>
>
>
> This course takes as its starting point the fact that we, as researchers,
> increasingly are not only sampling data, but take part in producing
> narratives as somehow prototypical, often involving ourselves in
> unconventional ways, and carried by genres and model artifacts that we
> barely understand or control (e.g. blogs or videos on shifting websites).
>
>
>
> Why call this prototypical narratives? In the philosophy of language, a
> prototype is a concrete exemplar that is used to represent a generality. In
> the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition, this has been taken up
> with a focus on how the exemplar is produced and handled as artifact in a
> situated practice, and how its status as prototypical, or potentially
> standard, is realized and reproduced in concrete networks of practices. The
> narrative approach in the social sciences and humanities has highlighted
> the sequential and contextual ordering of processes and events as
> meaningful in existential and practical terms. By its logical form,
> narrative proposes singular occurrences as meaningful and generally
> relevant. Taken together, prototypical narratives are narratives that
> designate certain meaningful processes, events and practices as
> prototypical by capturing them in text, video, or other media, broadly with
> a view to relevance for guiding and reflecting practice.
>
> This fusion of narrativity and STS seems relevant since a) we are
> increasingly required to provide concrete alternatives to the
> empiricist-rationalist format of knowledge that is embodied in the
> infrastructures of standardization through which practices are ruled, b)
> the cultural genres of narrative performance and production evolve rapidly,
> especially in terms of expanded technologies and challenges to the
> private/public divisions, and this means that c) anyway we produce and use
> model artifacts that take us well beyond what we can easily  handle
> (ethically and methodologically) as 'data' in research or 'case materials'
> in teaching.
>
>
>
> This new situation requires us to reconceptualize classic issues such as
>
> ●      *Temporality*: The way we recreate the past to feed hopes for the
> future is accelerating; historicity is overtaking any foundations;
>
> ●      *Reality*: With hyper-reality and reality TV, representation is no
> longer secondary to its reference; we co-create the events we call in to
> witness our stories;
>
> ●      *Performance*: Could it be that ‘citation’ of (e.g. gender or
> disease) standards increasingly fuse with producing and transforming them?
>
> ●      *Subjectivity*: It is increasingly ourselves that we perform and
> recreate, yet we tell of ourselves in forms that assume other objectivities
> (such as those of drama, TV or art);
>
> ●      *Logic*: Beyond the academic text, who knows how research questions,
> arguments or findings might look?
>
> We have been pondering these ideas for a while, reflecting on the videos
> and songs of former gang-members and drug users, ‘curating’ galleries, even
> confessing our past on websites. We are now so privileged as to have
> persuaded Emily Martin to help us understand it. Emily Martin is professor
> of Anthropology at New York University, famous for feminist and science
> studies, and deservedly praised for wonderful works such as *Bipolar
> Expeditions *from 2009.
>
>
>
> Besides academic presentations, the course will take up singular instances
> of what could be called prototypical narratives from the research practices
> and networks of teachers and students.
>
>
>
> We suggest a 4 days course in the fall of 2015. The precise time will be
> settled later.
>
>
>
>
>
> *Morten Nissen*
>
> PhD, Dr. Psych.
>
> Professor
>
> *Department of Education*
>
> Aarhus University
> Tuborgvej 164
>
> 2400 Copenhagen NV
>
>
>
> Tlf: +45 30282418
> www.edu.au.dk/
>
> --
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science as an object
> that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson