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Re: [xmca] Is Class an "Imagined" Community?
Is "class" an "imagined" community?
I want to give a personal example to engage this question.
I read Martin Packer's 2 chapters on epistemology and ontology (being-in-the-world) I've also been reading "relational" perspectives on "attuning"and corresponding with the CHAT "collective" [can I imagine a community?]
I start to IMAGINE how my interactions with children would change if I acted AS-IF attuning was central and fundamental to the children feeling "connected" and recognized and if my responding with a focus on attuning would have a dramatic change on the quality of OUR engagement with each other. This reverie IS IMAGINAL but the next day when I go in to work and act AS-IF attuning was central, I ACTUALLY act with more "awareness" and "attention" and "intentionality" and together a different quality of "community" and engagement is fostered.
Now, if in conversations with others [face-to-face or virtual] I can encourage others to pay attention to the centrality of attuning as the ground of creating zopeds then the culture in the classroom can start to change as connection rather than classroom management guides behavior.
Now I'm imagining that if I continue to come back to virtual CHAT locations to get inspiration and engage in conversation and ALSO ACTUALLY engage in trying to intentionally and imaginally pay close attention to engaging with others being-in-the-world then the "Projects" and "situated activity" that myself and the children engage in will be qualitatively different and I and the children will be qualitatively different "kinds of persons" in the "Actual structural communities" I participate in. {AND as a result of my "imagining community" there are qualitatively different kinds of community which I actually participate in}
Now I realize in this above narrative I've left out all the "constraints" and highlighted the "affordances" and Jessica Benjamin, and Willis [the lads] would challenge my valuing volitional conscious intent as idealizing "agency" but it is one particular stance in reflecting on the imaginal and the actual.
Larry
----- Original Message -----
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Date: Thursday, April 8, 2010 4:01 pm
Subject: [xmca] Is Class an "Imagined" Community?
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Is "class" an "imagined" community? If so, what about the
> family? Are they "imagined" in the same way as a nation? Or the
> so-called "world community" (a.k.a. the USA and its motley
> stooges, satraps, and dupes).
>
> One of the things I've learned from reading Jonathan Tudge's
> brilliant new synthesis of his old studies on how children live
> their everyday lives around the world is that some imagined
> communities are a whole lot more real than others.
>
> For example, it turns out that American middle class children do
> NOT actually get more academic instruction or even academic play
> or even more toys than other city dwellers around the world. And
> it turns out that urban Korean kids spend MORE time at play than
> kids in any of the other "imagined" communities that Jon and his
> grads studied.
>
> I imagine that whether your parents are country mice or city
> mice makes much more of a difference in determining your day
> to day activities, your access to play and to conversation, and
> probably, ultimately, you real (not imagined) life expectancy.
>
> And of course I confess to being one of the reactionaries that
> Jay talks about below. It seems to me that there is an implicit
> formalism, even a structuralism, here; Jay is trying to argue
> that somehow the content of human communication is absolutely
> independent of the medium in which it takes place.
>
> Compare, for just a moment, a round the world trip in an
> airplane with the same trip on foot or by bicycle or hitch-
> hiking. Surely the two experiences are different in some
> qualitative way, and the potential experiences are even more
> different than the real ones. The human scenery one experiences
> will be even more different than the topological one.
>
> As a Singaporean artist wrote, "difference is simulated by the
> selective intensification of similarities". Airplane travel is
> an essentially virtual, "imagined" experience, bearing a largely
> imaginary relationship to actual displacement. Is it really an
> accident that the "culture" of airports and first class
> lounges stinks of money and mediocrity, and will not linger in
> the memory at journey's end?
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
>
> --- On Wed, 4/7/10, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:
>
>
> From: Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] FW: ScienceDaily: Online interactions have
> positive effects for real-life communities
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Wednesday, April 7, 2010, 8:40 PM
>
>
>
> One person's zinger is another's "of course", of course. :-)
>
> A similar notion is one I've thought with for some time in
> relation to the, more of less pointless I think, debates about
> "real" vs "virtual" communities. I pretty much assign this
> discussion now to the dustbin of reactionary reactions to online
> communities, as the argument is mostly the reactionaries (OK, I
> could be nice and call them "traditionalists" ) saying that it's
> terrible that people, especially young people, are so enmeshed
> in online virtual communities that they might be spending less
> time in "real" ones. Like classrooms? the virtues of "real",
> i.e. face-to-face, meat-space communities elude me ... they are
> mostly institution-centric, boring, exploitative, routininzed,
> etc. In any case, the virtues, when they are found usually have
> little to do with the face-to-face nature (apart from subtlety
> of communicative resources, which are not often crucial), and
> more to do with matters of respect, trust, voicing unusual or
> new ideas, opinions,
> reactions, etc. Of course we are mostly culturally
> forbidden from actually leveraging the unique resource of FTF
> communities: touching one another.
>
> But the trumping argument for me has always been that so-called
> "real" communities are just as "virtual" (i.e. "imagined" as
> Emily reports) as any online community. That is to say, what
> matters about them is far more on the "ideal" than the material
> plane, far more about how they immerse us in "figured" worlds,
> wrought with meanings and feelings, expectations and surprises
> ... regardless of their material basis (calling across a room or
> chatting online).
>
> What makes a bunch of people "a community" is precisely how
> their imaginations intersect and set one another off. And if we
> choose to go so far as to "identify" with a community, then that
> too is pretty clearly an act of imagination, and not simply a
> declaration that we are in the room.
>
> And some of our "communities" require quite a leap of the
> imagination, too. The idea that a large nation-state is a
> community is quite a stretch, I think. Far more so than that
> xmca is a community. Even that a city is a community, rather
> than, more sensibly, an ecology of interdependent communities.
> But the human imagination knows no sensible limits. And its
> political exploitation has a long and glorious history.
>
> Thank God we can continue to imagine not just new communities,
> but new kinds of communities.
>
> Thanks, Emily, for the reminder!
>
> JAY.
>
> Jay Lemke
> Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
> Educational Studies
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
>
> Visiting Scholar
> Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
> University of California -- San Diego
> La Jolla, CA
> USA 92093
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 6, 2010, at 10:12 AM, Duvall, Emily wrote:
>
> > Hi All,
> > This just came out and the summary on this site has a few
> interesting> statements, particularly this last one:
> >
> >
> > "To a certain degree, all communities are 'imagined
> communities' -- that
> > is, our sense of being part of a community is always something
> we must
> > create in ourselves, and it often occurs through media."
> >
> >
> > I thought this might be of interest to some xmca-ers.... I
> know that
> > this last statement is quite a zinger for me. Not so much our
> sense of
> > being a part of a community, but that communities are
> imagined.
> >
> >
> > ~em
> >
> >
> > Online interactions have positive effects for real-life communities
> > http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100405131730.htm
> >
> > Online interactions not only have positive outcomes for real-life,
> > place-based communities, but the intersection between online
> > communication and the offline world also forms two halves of a
> support> mechanism for communities, according to a new study.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
> >
>
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