One resource for thinking about this is Strauss and Corbin's notion of
trajectories in chronic illness. Geof Bowker and I take this up in our
paper in MCA on tuberculosis trajectories. Chronic illness is interesting
because it is a kind of window into how different trajectories (I'm not yet
sure of the difference between time scale and trajectory, except I think
either can become the property of the other) can align, collide, knarl up,
etc. So for example a heart attack may bring a career trajectory to a much
slower pace, may stop altogether the career of being a cigarette smoker,
and affect other biographical trajectories in other ways.
What I find especially useful about the model is the language it begins to
develop for these cross-level interactions (Stefan Timmermans at Brandeis
has elaborated the model in helpful ways too). So for example several
trajectories can become clearly aligned, and "crystallize" together for a
time. In the opposite direction, trajectories can splinter each other or
cause stutters.
Just to make things more complicated, not only are we waiting to get on
certain trains, but we're travelling simultaneously on Amtrak, local
trolley, in our cars, on our bikes, and on the TGV (fast French
trains). Now this is beyond mixed metaphors, it's positively a mess.
L*
Here's some references for those interested in this work:
Unending work and care : managing chronic illness at home /, Juliet M.
Corbin, Anselm Strauss. San Francisco : Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1988.
Bowker, Geoffrey and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification
and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
(http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker/classification/)
Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker. 1997. "Of Lungs and Lungers: The
Classified Story of Tuberculosis," Mind, Culture and Activity 4:
3-23. Reprinted in Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, ed. Pp. 197-227,
Grounded Theory in Practice, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1997.
Timmermans, Stefan. 1996. 'Saving Lives or Saving Identities? The Double
Dynamic of Technoscientific Scripts.' Social Studies of Science. 26: 767-797.
Timmermans, Stefan. 1998'Mutual Tuning of Multiple Trajectories,' In
Symbolic Interaction 21:
>Many thanks to Leigh for her fascinating message, and her dreamscape!
>
>Obviously I liked the images of the trains that move too fast to get on,
>whose access doors aren't spaced the right distance apart, which don't
>come back around to give us more chances to climb aboard. Sounds very much
>like science education to me, and like a lot of other mechanisms of
>exclusion in our society. Leigh wrote:
>
> >So I moved to another train, the social science
> >one, that had many more kinds of doors, closer together, and moved at a
> >pace I could articulate with my life (needing to work odd jobs, do
> >community organizing, grow up).
>
>"At a pace I could articulate with my life" ... resonates not just with
>the times of formal education and early career, but with the times when
>the pace of my life has gotten so hectic, the leisure moments to try
>something new coming so briefly and so far apart, that it hardly seems
>there are any new trains I can get on. Of course I have always sort of
>hopped back and forth among trains moving at much the same pace relative
>to one another, perhaps always trying to catch the train that is furthest
>ahead at any given moment, going in the direction I currently want to go
>(the Semiotics Express, the Phenomenology local, the Great Western
>monorail, the P O M & O, etc.). Once you are on one of these trains, it's
>not hard to catch another; their relative speeds are not so different, and
>their tracks run parallel for long enough distances to allow a fairly safe
>jump from one to another.
>
>In the narrowest of educational applications of this metaphor, think how
>little _variety_ of pacing is allowed for learning. The rate at which
>courses are taught, examinations scheduled, does not vary even within a
>single order of magnitude. And some subjects speed by relentlessly, in
>some unfathomable hurry to get to their destinations with as few
>passengers aboard as possible (science most clearly, mathematics along the
>early part of its run; contrast the leisurely pace of the humanities, with
>the same stations re-visited again and again, more like a Caribbean cruise
>line or those loop trains for shoppers, get off and stay as long as you
>like, get back on, no extra fare).
>
>In my reply to Mike, I agreed that we need to focus more on the issues of
>synchronies and dyssynchonies within levels as important to understanding
>the possibilies for emergent processes at N+1. The more I have thought
>about this since, the more critical it seems to be. In a next stage of
>refinement of the model, we need to really understand better the logic of
>the (N-1, N) and (N+1, N) relations. There is good evidence in complexity
>theory (e.g. Prigogine's germinal work on entropy in non-equilibrium
>systems) for the crucial important of temporal coherence information in
>systems (what classical physics call 'phase' relations). If you just
>momentarily stopped all the processes at all scales in a living human,
>they might spontaneously re-start, but they wouldn't synchronize and
>coordinate properly with one another, wouldn't support one another, be
>there at the right moments for one another, and the higher scales
>organizational levels would begin to degrade and disintegrate. Like missed
>connections on the train system. This 'synchronization' information is
>what makes many systems 'irreversible' as collectivities, even though
>basic Newtonian physics says that each constituent interaction is
>reversible on its own. It's the ratchet of order in the cosmos, and in our
>lives.
>
>So if we are looking to better understand not just Giddens'
>regionalization (itself of course important), but the boundary maintenance
>that keeps the time-space slices and the activities that inhabit them
>walled off from one another (or not), and so keeps different social castes
>in their Places, and our individual life trajectories hemmed on all
>timescales from a day-in-the-life to life-chances in the long term, then
>perhaps we should be looking at the relative rates, synchronies, and
>dyssynchronies between the trains we're on and the trains that pass us by.
>
>JAY.
>
>
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE
>PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
>CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
>JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
><http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
>---------------------------