> I wanted identify what
>might be some problems in applying the construct of community of practice to
>this setting, and what might be some alternative interpretations or frameworks
>which may be useful in understanding activity and participation in this
>context.
What if we start with the practice and then identify who is involved with
the practice and in what capacity and at what time? I've been thinking
that the spatialization, the mapping, the territorialization is part of the
problem, part of what makes activity/practice too static, too bounded, too
much like our ideologies of nationality that imaginatively circumscribe and
own us.
Howard Becker, coming from different theoretical perspectives, arrived at
something like a COP perspective I think in his notion of art worlds, where
he drew together people acting in quite varied capacities and times
(audiences and actors, educators and critics, carpenters and tailors,
writers and printers, sponsors and electicians, etc.). The limits then may
be limits of interest, of traffic, of change. Latour is another who has
argued for quite dispersed, heterogeneous networks that don't necessarily
fit within ethnosociological categories or geographically/institutionally
defined sites.
>The problem with mappying communities of practice when it comes to an actual
>research setting is that I'm finding it's a lot more complicated than I
>thought. How does one delimit? To determine where one COP starts and another
>ends? What about people who identify/belong to multiple COPs that cross
>contexts? How do we inventory all the COPs we belong to? I'm sure if I tried
>this I might miss something. This overlapping notion is problemmatic. What
>happens when COPs are nested, for example, hierarchically? Then, I keep
>thinking I'm making it all too static, it's not a thing, dammit.
Paul Prior
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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