Dear All
As Mike mentioned here are a few thoughts from me by way of a 'kick start' to the conversation about Kirsten Foot's paper.
This is a thought provoking and very useful paper. The clarification it offers on the two branches of meaning of the term object is carefully drawn and will be an important source of reference. I would like to speculate on how this anlysis could be extended.
The production of the object is a key feature of this paper. If we take a CHAT approach to the analysis of the activity -- the production of the object -- then we would want to analyse the divison of labour, the social rules and the discursive practices in which subjects are positioned and take up positions with respect to the object. I think there is an important start point in the data that Kirsten Foot presents. She has identified two object conceptions and their transformations through time: the monitoring of ethnic relations and the building of an epistemic community. A task related object and an object concerned with social relations. Are these two object conceptions or are they elements of a discourse on the object in which one element may be fore-grounded by subjects engaging from some positions and back-grounded by those in other positions?
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