Hi Everybody,
Included here as Attachments you will find Abstracts for Volume 6, No.4
and Volume 7, Nos. 1 & 2 of Mind, Culture, and Activity. Vol. 6, No. 4
should be distributed by the end of this month. The special double
issue for Volume 7, Nos. 1 & 2, is scheduled to come off press in May.
Lots of good reading ahead!
For those of you who might not yet subscribe you can contact Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Inc. by calling toll free 1-800-9-BOOKS-9 or
sending email to: orders who-is-at erlbum.com.
If you have an article you think might be of interest to our diverse
readership, send it to Peggy Bengel, LCHC, 0092, UC San Diego, La Jolla,
CA 92093-0092. Criteria for submissions can be found on our web page at http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Journal/moremca.html.
Peggy
Abstracts
MCA 6(4)
Social Constructivism and the Process-Content
Distinction as Viewed by Vygotsky and the Pragmatists
Richard S. Prawat
In a recent article in this journal, Stetsenko and Arievitch
compare and contrast three versions of social
constructivism, all of which successfully deal with one
vexing epistemological problem, the separation of mind
and world. However, solutions offered by the first two
approaches are problematic, according to the authors,
because of the way they treat the subject-object issue. On
this score, Gal'perin's brand of post-Vygotskianism is
preferred because it manages to retain the individual
while externalizing the mind. As I point out in this paper,
all three approaches fail when it comes to solving a third,
equally intractable problem--the process versus content
dualism. In the last part of the paper I present a
promising solution to all three problems first proposed by
Peirce and Dewey and later embraced by Lev Vygotsky in
the last years of his life. Hybridity and Hybrid Language
Practices in the Third Space
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Kris D. Gutiérrez
Patricia Baquedano-López
Carlos Tejeda
In this paper we provide a perspective on hybridity both
as a theoretical lens for understanding diversity and a
method for organizing learning. We argue that the use of
multiple, diverse, and even conflicting mediational tools
promotes the emergence of Third Spaces, or zones of
development, thus expanding learning. Using examples
from our ethnographic study of the literacy practices of
one dual immersion elementary school classroom, we
illustrate through an analysis of the discourse and literacy
practices of the teacher and students in this culture of
collaboration, how hybrid activities, roles, and practices
can lead to productive contexts of development.
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The Social Context of Learning Mathematics: Stepping
Beyond the Cognitive Framework.
Farida Abdulla Khan
Two groups of vendors and a group of school children
were compared for differences on their knowledge of
number systems and their competence and understanding
of a set of mathematical word problems. Statistical
analyses revealed that vendors had a better
understanding of the mathematical principles and a better
range of strategies than the school children who were
constrained by a narrow application of school-learned
routines and algorithms. A lack of the more conventional
mathematical algorithms however, reduced the efficiency
of the vendors in solving the problems. The performance
of all three groups was evaluated in the contexts of the
socio-cultural milieu within which they function.
Ethnographic descriptions and a contextual analysis of the
activities of vending and of schooling as also the
involvement and participation of the vendors and
schoolchildren in these settings, helped to explain and
locate the mathematical practices and the mathematical
understanding of the subjects. The argument put forward
in the paper is that cognitive and psychological
functioning is deeply embedded in historical and socio-
cultural contexts and that any understanding or
assessment of the individual will remain incomplete if
these are ignored.
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MCA Abstracts Vol. 7, Nos. 1&2
Embodied Practices of Engineering Work
Lucy Suchman
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
This paper explores relations between activity theoretic and ethnomethodological studies of work and its objects, with specific reference to the case of design practices in civil engineering. My starting point is the shared interest of activity theory and ethnomethodology in the place of artifacts in everyday working practice. I review briefly some basic premises of first ethnomethodological, then activity theoretic studies of artifacts-in-use. I then offer a preliminary account of computer-aided and paper-based design work in civil engineering, informed by both perspectives. My account emphasizes the multiplicity of media and associated objects involved in the work of engineering on the one hand, and their integration in practice into a coherent field of action on the other. The paper concludes by returning to the question of relations between ethnomethodology and activity theory, focussing on differences in their respective stances toward theory itself.
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Practices of Color Classification
Charles Goodwin
University of California, Los Angeles _
Color categories sit at the intersection of two central topics in the study of human cognition: 1) the analysis of vision, and 2) the study of semantic categories, or more generally processes of classification. Using as data videotape of archaeologists filling out a coding sheet that requires them to systematically describe the color of the dirt they have excavated, this paper describes the practices required to competently classify color within the work life of their profession. The task of color classification is embedded within a situated activity system, which includes not only several different ways of identifying the same color (each designed for alternative uses), but also cognitive artifacts, such as Munsell color chart, and specific embodied practices. The chart creates a historically constituted architecture for perception, a heterotopia that juxtaposes in a single visual field two very different kinds of space. As multiple parties fill out the coding sheet together the full resources of the organization of talk-in-interaction are brought to bear on the contingent tasks they are charged with accomplishing. The present investigation of a situated activity system encompassing not only semantic categories, but also physical tools and embodied practices, contrasts with most previous research on color categories, which has focussed almost exclusively on mental phenomena, and not on how people perform color classification to pursue a relevant course of action in the consequential settings that make up their lifeworld.
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Organizing Multiple Vision
Yasuko Kawatoko
Daito Bunka University
On a factory that produces large quantities of precision metal parts through the use of computer controlled lathes, workers from different divisions of labour such as lathe operators, inspectors, and managers organize multiple vision to make cutting processes and the quality of products visible. The first part of this paper investigates how the lathe operators juxtapose a range of different kinds of documents and artifacts to both program their lathes and build a perceptual field where relevant events in the process become visible. In the second part of the paper, particular attention is paid to a "standard plan" as a
boundary object. A common standard plan is used in different ways in different sections of the plant to accomplish their practice. A standard plan organizes multiple, perspectival vision of the "same" events in different sections, while simultaneously, it becomes a tool for coordinating different divisions of labour.
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Ecologies of Inscription: Technologies of making the social organization of work and the mass production of machine parts visible in collaborative activity
Naoki Ueno
National Institute for Educational Research, Japan
This paper focuses on technologies for making social organization, the work and the mass production mutually visible in collaborative activity. I describe how practitioners in a manufacturing factory mutually organize accountability of their own social organization, the work, and the mass produced products through using various inscriptions and other technologies along with concretely demonstrating the above presuppositions of society and the work. Among them, I focus on how multi-layered accountabilities are organized, and on how the multi-layered accountabilities or multiply organized activities are linked up, and coordinated with inscriptions and other technologies. At linking points, mutualities of various divisions of labour are organized. In addition, at a linking point, what occur is not the transmission of invariant information, but the transformation of the information. Imaging the relations across inscriptions as a linear chain can be viewed as one of the more popular inscriptions locally utilized by management on specific occasions.
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Configuring Action in Objects: From mutual space to media space
Christian Heath
Jon Hindmarsh
King's College London
It has long been recognised that the material environment is an essential feature of the organisation of social action and interaction. It is only recently however, that we have witnessed a burgeoning body of empirical studies, from within both the social and cognitive sciences, which has begun to delineate the ways in which objects are socially constructed and feature in social relations and activities. Despite this growing interest in the object in social life, there remains a paucity of research concerned with how objects are reflexively constituted in and through social interaction. In this paper, we consider how aspects of the material environment are rendered momentarily intelligible in and through interaction, and the ways in which objects provide a resource for the recognition of the actions and activities of others. We examine interaction in both conventional working environments and new experimental spaces created through advanced telecommunication and communication technologies to reveal the ways in which the sense and significance of social actions and activities are embedded in, and inseparable, from the local ecology.
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Seeing What One Sees: Perception, Emotion, and Activity
Aug Nishizaka
In this paper, it is demonstrated (1) how seeing is organized in the spatiotemporal arrangement of bodies and conduct within which the participants display and manage their orientations to the ongoing activity, and (2) how seeing and emotion are mutually constituted in the precise coordination of conduct and how they, along with other various kinds of things, can constitute resources for organizing the ongoing activity. The view advanced in this paper sharply contradicts the traditional conception of visual perception, according to which the verb 'see' names a discrete process, event or state hidden under the individual's skin. Seeing is rather an organizational feature of an embodied, visible activity.
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Patents, Promotions, and Protocols: Mapping and Claiming Scientific Territory
Michael Lynch, Director
Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture, and Technology (CRICT)
Brunel University
Kathleen Jordan
Gerontology Center
Boston University
Scientific representations include a diverse and confusing array of maps, descriptions, diagrams, and protocols. This study examines and compares the practical and communicative uses of such artifacts. The main source of material is the authors' ethnographic research on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a laboratory routine which has numerous scientific, medical, and forensic applications. Contextually relative versions of PCR are examined: schematic diagrams for popular audiences; advertisements in biotech publications; patent descriptions; praxiological descriptions (recipe-like formulations); and material standards and references. These renderings do not exemplify a single type of cognition or information processing. Schematic diagrams, advertisements, patents, protocols, and material standards are differently formed, and they information they convey substantially differs from one form to another. This study contributes to a non-cognitivist understanding of representation that emphasizes diverse communicative practices and material renderings.
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Invisible Mediators of Action: Classification and the Ubiquity of Standards
Geoffrey C. Bowker
Susan Leigh Star
University of California at San Diego
This paper is a methodological think piece about the ways in which classifications (and standards) impinge in myriad ways on our daily lives. We argue that although they are frequently invisible to us, they are highly political and ethically charged. We suggest four principles garnered from our own research and that of others that can together be used to give a picture of their scope and reach: recognizing their ubiquity analyzing their material texture; examining ways in which they reconfigure our understanding of the past; and exploring their practical politics. Together, the principles suggest a "reverse engineering" of classification systems to reveal the multitude of local political and social struggles and compromises which go into the constitution of a "universal" classification.
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