Paul,
Thanks for your insights. I think I've been painting myself into a corner. I
really like your warning about how using static categories ("ethnosociological
categories or geographically/institutionally defined sites") can lead to a
kind of theoretical nationalism. I certainly want to move beyond that, and I
think that starting with practice certainly is a place to begin (even, though,
don't practices have to be somewhat socially organized, too, which of
necessity involves analysis and boundary articulation?) I will certainly look
up Becker. You're the second person who has referred me to his work. Thanks
again.
Sara
>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
Vanderbilt University &
Partnership for After School Education
New York, N.Y.
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