[Xmca-l] Re: Research on refugees/immigrants/migrants and Legitimate Peripheral Participation?

Sat Jun 29 07:19:22 PDT 2019

Two comments, Huw —

A moment in cultural studies, yes. Of course it depends on your purpose in characterising something. My purposes are short-term practical what-can-I-use-to-address-this-problem, and the problems I address (in labor education) are collective employment-related social justice problems, so that’s a very specific arc of human experience. My main question is “How can I use this?”  Your purposes — although I should let you define them yourself — are much more from the perspective of the researcher, cultural historian, academic,maybe something like “What does this mean in the big picture of psychology?" 

Second comment — I don’t understand what you mean by "reluctance to investigate exactly how and where that information manifests, along with other aspects of activity.”  How does “information manifest”?

Thanks — Helena

> On Jun 29, 2019, at 9:23 AM, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Helena.
> 
> There was advocacy for learning as participation. But yes, I wouldn't think of it as a method, rather an area of focus, literally following the meaning of the words rather than assuming "CoP" means something in particular. If one wanted to characterise "CoP" as it is historically described, then a key part of its history seems to be emphasising that there is much more to learning that formal learning of information, but this is combined with a reluctance to investigate exactly how and where that information manifests, along with other aspects of activity. I would describe it as a moment in cultural studies rather than a theory per se.
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> On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 at 18:20, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Huw - you’re right. I do not remember (don’t have the book in front of me) anything in LPP about the value to society or ethical character of a practice. So you could have a cult that survived across many generations and it would satisfy the three guidelines.
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> Lave herself did not at all like having the LPP theory turned into a “how to” recipe. That’s behind her distancing herself as much as possible from Wenger as time went on. 
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> But they don’t claim that LPP is a total theory. It’s what they (or she) saw when looking at the five examples of practices, and it’s an answer to a specific question. It’s one way to slice the cake, not the bakery itself. In order to slice a different way, you need another theory. Maybe four or five.
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> helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
> helena.worthen1
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>> On Jun 28, 2019, at 10:14 AM, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com <mailto:huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> This is one of the 'issues' with LPP, regarding Helena's third question and 'real work'. Because LLP, as it is described, does not venture into the structure and validity of the community's practice, but rather treats it as a given working (different meaning to 'real work' Helena refers to) practice, it becomes more difficult to apply a blanket assumption that the communal practice actually works when it is only concerned with part of an undertaking, e.g. a process of accreditation rather than actual production. This is not to say that the accreditation is necessarily phoney, but rather that many practices are required to be regulated. And the nature of that regulation has a bearing upon the community and its practices. For instance, one can look to the 'situated' practice of a professional as something that takes place concurrently with their membership of (or affinity with) a professional body. This is why it seems to me that the authenticity of the participation is closely related to the viability of the practice. When you cannot take the viability for granted (when the practice doesn't speak for itself) the nature of the participation becomes more of a question -- exactly what kinds of 'exploitation' are being bought into, what trade-offs are being made?
>> 
>> The CoP in this sense seems to be a convenient simplification, omitting questions about the viability of the practice and the developmental aspects of the agents, to focus instead on the participation.
>> 
>> Huw
>> 
>> On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 at 14:43, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> Hi —
>> 
>> To see if L&W’s theory of LLP could be applied usefully to the examples given by Andy (employment, the Catholic Church, many families — I put in “many”, etc) you could just ask the questions implied by the three guidelines that I mentioned in my previous message. 
>> 
>> For example, employment: In your job in a restaurant, are you confident that you have a right to learn the whole craft or skill set required to take any position, from doing the dishes to hosting at the front desk to ordering the supplies to doing the accounting and balancing the books? If yes, go to the next question. Is the path to learning all these different things clear, transparent, and recognized by everyeone else? And incentivized? If yes, go to the next question: right now, are you doing real work that is necessary to the success of the restaurant? Are all the other people around you doing real work? Or is someone being excluded, kept on one job month after month, clueless about the overall functioning of the place?
>> 
>> If yes, then you’re probably working in a co-op project that was set up in advance by a group of people who had a certain vision of a restaurant, and you’re lucky!! You could use L&W’s guidelines as a way to monitor the culture of the restaurant as the years go by and new people get brought in. There will undoubtedly be people coming in who don’t understand the culture, who just want to treat it as a job, and others who are willing to let this happen. The founders will be getting old and no one seems to be interested in stepping up, and the group has failed to incentiveize the rising of new leadership. This will probably lead to a big meeting of the members of the co-op and a decision to either re-up the collective culture or else sell the place (which is probably a successful business), divide up the shares, and go home. 
>> 
>> In the 1990s, in the US, as “job training” became the official response to de-industrialiation and the movement of good union jobs overseas, a counter-movement within the job training community (and there was huge money to be made in job training!) existed that took the position that job training to include “all aspects of the industry.” (This was somewhere in the Perkins Act which funded vocational training.)  In the case of training for culinary/hospitality work “all aspects of the industry” would mean that you would learn not just how to clean rooms or how to operate dishwashers, but the whole history and economy of the industry, including the role of unions.  This effort did exist but since it did not support the main neo-liberal agenda of lowering the cost of labor, it faded away. 
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>> Helena
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>> helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>> helena.worthen1
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>>> On Jun 28, 2019, at 8:29 AM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> My interest, Alfredo, rather than taking something to an extreme to prove a point, was to try to see the situation (peripheral participation, apprenticeship, maser/servant relations, etc.) as normal, ethically sanctioned, everyday relations. In my view, it is in such everyday relations that exploitation and oppression happens. The very person or organisation which you turn to to meet your needs may be the vehicle for your exploitation.
>>> 
>>> Think of employment, the Catholic Church, the family, political parties, ...
>>> Andy
>>> Andy Blunden
>>> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm <https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
>>> On 28/06/2019 9:03 pm, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
>>>> Hi Helena, all, 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> yes, I can see how CHAT can be relevant to fighting oppression and de-humanisation. I was wondering more about the peripheral participation metaphor in Lave and Wenger. I guess my question has to do with the challenge of thinking of participation in a context in which all opportunities to pursue the satisfaction of your basic human needs are shutdown and taken away from you through violence. Andy seems to imply in his response that this is still some form of participation. Not sure about that. I wonder if the notion of participation holds when agency no longer is a possibility. But of course, I was reducing the question to the very narrow case of children being held in inhumane conditions. I thought that this reduction to the extreme may be useful for thinking the limits of our theoretical premises, an exercise that may be particularly relevant in the context of existential crisis in which we find ourselves; as a means to imagine how far we can go with our current ideas and what sort of action/thinking needs to be done in a context in which we may be pushed to the limit, right before the point of no longer being. 
>>>> 
>>>> Sorry Greg for having taken your initial request for a walk... Thanks for having opening the other thread to more properly address your initial question. 
>>>> 
>>>> Alfredo
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> From: Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com> <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>>>> Sent: 27 June 2019 15:13
>>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>>> Cc: Alfredo Jornet Gil
>>>> Subject: Re: [Xmca-l] Re: Research on refugees/immigrants/migrants and Legitimate Peripheral Participation?
>>>>  
>>>> Alfredo — Try turning the question around: how does CHAT surface (make visible to the researcher) the activities that are taking place in a community of practice where people are fighting oppression and de-humanisation? What are these people doing to carry on the fight?
>>>> 
>>>> CHAT’s power to reveal conflict and contradiction comes into play here. 
>>>> 
>>>> This is an issue that kept rising and then sinking during  the consensus points discussion for Re-Gen.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>>>> helena.worthen1
>>>> 
>>>>> On Jun 27, 2019, at 7:18 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no <mailto:a.j.gil@ils.uio.no>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Just to add, that the problem I'd like to learn more about is, how does a framework that takes apprenticeship and community as starting point help when the object of research is one that concerns oppression and dehumanisation? 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Alfredo
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no <mailto:a.j.gil@ils.uio.no>>
>>>>> Sent: 27 June 2019 02:37
>>>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Research on refugees/immigrants/migrants and Legitimate Peripheral Participation?
>>>>>  
>>>>> I cannot help with this, Greg, since I don't know of work specifically connecting the two. But if your student gets to write about that, I'd be very interested in reading her/his work.
>>>>> 
>>>>> A few days ago, I was listening Amy Goodman's interview with a lawyer who visited children detention centres in the US border. I literally cried as I was commuting to work listening to the horrendous inhumanity being described. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> (Interview here:) https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2019/6/24 <https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2019/6/24> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Now, reading your question, I wondered, what is "legitimate participation" for a child in a detention center? What is the center and what the periphery in such a context? And for a Syrian refugee in a shelter in Turkey? Is there anything like a community of practice that belongs to being a refugee or immigrant?
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Not that I am sceptical about or questioning the relevance of the approach to the issue. Just that I don't know how, would like to know. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Best,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Alfredo
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com <mailto:greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>>
>>>>> Sent: 26 June 2019 18:23
>>>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Research on refugees/immigrants/migrants and Legitimate Peripheral Participation?
>>>>>  
>>>>> Just wondering if anyone out there could point me to research on refugees/immigrants/migrants and Legitimate Peripheral Participation (or otherwise connect the former with Lave and Wenger's communities of practice)?
>>>>> 
>>>>> (this is for a student of mine)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> Greg
>>>>> 
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
>>>>> Assistant Professor
>>>>> Department of Anthropology
>>>>> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
>>>>> Brigham Young University
>>>>> Provo, UT 84602
>>>>> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu <http://greg.a.thompson.byu.edu/> 
>>>>> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson <http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson>
>> 
> 

Helena Worthen
21 San Mateo Road
Berkeley, CA 94707
hworthen@illinois.edu
510-828-2745
Skype Helena.worthen1

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