Re: At a loss (Re: All the way with Piaget)

Naoki Ueno (nueno who-is-at nier.go.jp)
Wed, 6 May 1998 00:12:55 +0900

>is a challenge of developing a language of the psychosocial
>that starts more globally, more inclusively
>than with "mind" and "mental" (masculine)

The term boundary crossing or crossing boundary appears
sailient in Suchman' s 1994 paper of CSCW, for me.

She is starting the issue of boundary crossing as show in
the following.

"This paper develops the proposal that feminism offers a way to begin to
replace the designer/user opposition - an opposition that closes off our
possibilities for recognizing the subtle and profound boundaries that
actually do divide us - with a rich, densely structured landscape of
identities and working relations within which we might begin to move with
some awareness and clarity of our own positions.

My starting place for this discussion is Donna Haraway's 'Situated Knowledges:

Feminists don't need a doctrine of objectivity that promises
transcendence, a story that loses track of its mediations just where
someone might be held responsible for something, and unlimited instrumental
power. We don't want a theory of innocent powers to represent the world,
where languages and bodies both fall into the bliss of organic symbiosis.
We also don't want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms
of Global Systems, but we do need an earthwide network of connections,
including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very
different - and power differentiated - communities. We need the power of
modem critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order
to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies
that have a chance for a future (1 99 1, p. 187)."

In the above paper, some relevant issues are included.

That is,
boundaries or boundary crossing is not objectively observed by
transcendence perspective. People who are involving a practice
such as artifact design confronts the peoblem
of boundary constitution and boundary crossing.