I can see the reason for the excitement, and as I've come of age at LCHC
over the last few years, it is this issue --what to call, how to frame
analytically and explore methodologically, and what theoretical
characterization to give these "meso zones"-- that has been the most
salient issue for me.
If it is true that identity is liquid, and we move from one identity
instantiation to another, then there must be accompanying socio-material
formations within which such identities can be had while being
simultaneously porous and loose enough to allow relatively unproblematic
entry/exit. No doubt that there are longer-lived structuring structures
within which, and relative to which, these meso-scale formations come to
life, but those are not the proximal site of interest here. Further, those
meso-scale formations that result from purposeful (and vulnerable) coming
together without any guarantee of anything, are special indeed.
I fear the abstract here, but I will say at least that these things, for
me, are a kind of prolepsis engine, formations through which different
possibilities of how future arrangements might be organized are tried out
in vivo, with all the complexities of the real thing because, well, they
are the real thing!
The lack of clear-cut language is not surprising, because at the moment the
pull inward that participants undergo around these collaborative
partnerships, in my experience, surfaces as an ethical aesthetic which does
not yet enjoy the clarity of a full blown political program of action.
There might even be more than a little fatigue with the latter, and more
of a desire to explore different ways of being together that do not require
(and may die as soon as these are reached) clear categories and conceptual
pronouncements.
ivan
On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
Eugene Matusov has an article in Outlines on the topic of the
sustainability of these projects: http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.**
dk/index.php/outlines/article/**view/2662<
http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/outlines/article/view/2662>where
he says: "The success of our after-school partnership between a
community center and our university's School of Education does not
necessarily require ... a common vision between partners or even
compatible
visions." I would welcome comments on this view.
Also, what is the story with the Laboratory School at UCLA?
Andy
Andy Blunden wrote:
By "crisis," Ivan, I had in mind just the kind of situation you describe
in southern San Diego.
As I reported to Mike at the time, when I read "Cultural Psychology" a
few years ago, I got really excited, not so much because of the specific
teaching and learning methods that were going to be used, but rather
that -
like the climax of a detective novel - Mike had identified the culprit,
the
research problem that lay at the heart of problems of poverty and
illiteracy in developed countries - /how is it possible to sustain a
project/? what characterises a /sustainable project/? This revelation
was
crucial in my coming to the conclusion that the molar unit of analysis
for
CHAT had to be the /collaborative project/, athe conclusion which I
drew in
my book published earlier this year, "An Interdisciplinary Theory of
Activity."
This did not mean of course that I had the answer - Heavens! a concrete
answer to teh question of what sustains a collaborative project is the
answer to all the problems of modernity. It is a clear definition, in my
view, of the problem, the "germ cell" for an understanding of modern
social
life. It is what really needs to be studied.
"Collaborative project" is not just a special topic or one choice for
making interventions, because (1) "Project," in my view, is a much
better
way of concieving of the unit of social life than "system of activity."
In
particular, the relation between the so-called object and "system." For
a
project, the aim is not something separate which gets added to the
system
of activity, but is /immanent in the project itself/. It is emergent.
It is
"realised." (2) "Collaboration" is the fundamental, normative
relationship
between people of modern life. So it is an adequate definition of what
we
need to be studying when we do research into human life. We need to
understand collaboration. But fairly few CHAT researchers (let alone
anyone
else) make this explicit and upfront. Collaboration is only possible if
there is a project to collaborate on and all projects are collaborative.
Concepts originate as the immanent realised aims of projects. So
collaborative projects form the units of our psychic life just as they
are
the units of our social life. So as a unit of /analysis/, collaborative
projects reflect collaborative projects as the *real* unit of social
life.
So you can understand how excited I was to read your article in /Theory
&
Psychology/!
Andy
Ivan Rosero wrote:
Well, bankruptcies can still make more than a few very rich, so the
"we"
and "our" in this building of habitable imaginaries presupposes a prior
set
of other imaginaries through to come together anew, and perhaps
differently, even if we think we know each other --or, in other words,
to
give each other space to be other things, to be strangers in creative
ways
in order to have any hope of reinventing and in*forming what we do in
such
a way to make it more hospitable.
As it happens, one tendril that continues to pass through Town and
Country,
but is now much more active elsewhere in southeast San Diego, is a
strong
connection to the food system change movement, which another graduate
student at LCHC is exploring after having dwelt for a while at T&C.
Here
is one of its core members, Diane Moss (quoted in
http://www.voiceofsandiego.**org/people/q_and_a/article_**
cde3547e-f6b1-11e0-bfba-**001cc4c03286.html<
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/people/q_and_a/article_cde3547e-f6b1-11e0-bfba-001cc4c03286.html
)
who we know personally, answering a few questions in a way that
concretizes
the shape of a few new imaginaries that we here at LCHC have been drawn
into:
*What happened when you came back from that workshop in 2008?*
I started seeing empty lots and seeing they could be used for other
purposes. I saw that we probably had the ability to grow our own food.
I bet on any block in southeastern San Diego, somebody's growing
something
in their backyard: collard greens, corn. We started looking at how we
could
take that talent and start having conversations about collective
growing
or
community gardens. Even though we didn't use the term "food desert" at
that
time, we talked about why we didn't have the same markets everyone else
has.
*Why didn't you like "food desert"?*
I thought desert meant nothing — that you had nothing to build on. I
said,
well, we've got people who grow things. We're not starting from
scratch.
But I embraced it when I became familiar with another definition: that
there are more fast food outlets than fresh food outlets.
*You hadn't thought about access to good food in this community as a
problem before 2008?*
Southeastern San Diego always gets tagged as a community with lots of
problems. So here was another negative tag people put on this
community.
I
saw that we didn't have the resources we needed, but I didn't think of
it
in terms of a food desert.
*What have been the biggest challenges to getting people involved?*
People say yes, we should have gardens. But it's difficult for people
to
change their habits.
*How do you change habits?*
It takes time. Neighbors talking to neighbors. People taking a chance
to
do
something different.
-------
LCHC has been fortunate beyond any expectation to have entered into
this
new collaboration and the mesh of actors it pulls together.
Ivan
On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 11:54 AM, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
wrote:
My response to this thread is an extension of the notion of
"ambivalence"
at the heart and soul of all social imaginaries.
It was mentioned that the motivating force to "keep going" without
clarity
of intention or goals is the "felt sense" of social BANKRUPTCY
[economic
metaphor] in the current social imaginary. Zygmunt Bauman uses the
very
extreme metaphor of "waste" in his 2004 book to stir the ambivalence
at
the
center of our current social imaginary. Ingold's article I recently
posted
captured the 12 century social imaginary where walking, texts,
architecture, discourse, and contemplation were all manifestations of
a
single ontology. All these objects expressed a social imaginary that
did
not have some of the object "representing" the "underlying" social
imaginary but rather were ALL immanebt manifestations of the SAME
social
imaginary.
Modernity [the tension between enlightenment and romanitic
hermeneutical
ideas/ideals] also may have an encompassing social imaginary that has
a
fundamental rupture [ambivalence] in the notion of "representation" as
expressing some "underlying" reality
[realization] when in actuality the modern walks, texts, architecture,
discourses and contemplations are expressions of a monolithic social
imaginary.
Bauman's analysis of modernity [he is an "exile" from the holocaust]
has
situated ambivalence at the heart of ALL social imaginaries when
realized
express "order" or "structure" which requires LIMITING formations.
This is
the core idea of sociology. Baumans emancipatory vision for
sociological
imagination [in which he generates multiple metaphors] is to explicate
the
ambivalence at the heart of modernity leading to social bankruptcy. It
is
the reality of this ambivalence in our current modern social imaginary
where Bauman locates hope and the possibility for emancipation from
the
"waste lands".
Bauman purposely is exploring the power of the metaphor of "waste" to
grasp
the desolation of our current arrangements. For Bauman the metaphor of
"waste" as the by-product of our "productions" in our "garden
contexts"
[another metaphor which the Nazi's used to create a social imaginary
where
Jews were "weeds" in the garden] is grasping the fundamental
ambivalence
at the heart of our social bankruptcy.
For Bauman and many others who are searching for a new orientation in
our
globalized planetary social imaginary the metaphor of "the suffering
stranger" travelling in the waste lands is the moral calling
requiring a
response as a growing "response-ability" as a "skill" developing
within
a
"new commons".
We need new "practises" and new "texts" and also new discourses and
new
forms of contemplation. However, I'm wondering how central to
transcending
our current social imaginary, which is now a wasteland, are new forms
of
architecture which express the yearning to respond to the suffering
stranger.
In summary, the larger contexts being explored may be
cultural-semiotic
imaginaries that must become realized within a new commons which must
be
in*formed to "hold" the suffering stranger in our midst [difference
and
alterity and weeds and waste as the ambivalence at the heart of the
modern
vision of the garden]
Accountability, measurement, statistics, as our current social
imaginary of
cultural and social "order" at its heart has the cavity of the
suffering
stranger that is now calling for a response and a new cultural and
social
order in a new commons which must be in*formed as our response-ability
to
the call of the other.
Bauman's notion of "waste" and "waste lands" as by-products of our
globalized social imaginary calls for an alternative social imaginary
that
exists in the ambivalence at the heart of our current world order.
Larry
On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Ivan Rosero <irosero@ucsd.edu>
wrote:
Arturo, two things coincide for me in reading your email: 1) I've
been
working for the last 4 years in the same collaboration that
Lecusay,Downing-Wilson,Cole have written about, and 2) I too share
the
following concern:
----
CHAT keeps operating with a process and methodological
ontology whereby the individual and the social are inseparable but
does not provide a clear cut language of description of how the
social
structure shapes activity or, to put it in Seeger's terms, how power
shapes discourse (and consciousness and identy).
----
As the authors have described, the community setting in which this
latest
of LCHC's projects has unfolded does not permit even the relatively
loose
structures that were the hallmarks of previous 5D projects --this is
where
the ad-hoc stumbling upon interesting things to do together is such
an
important component of the dual sense of "appropriation". In the
social
space that has been created between LCHC and Town and Country there
exists
(as I have experienced it over the last four years) an enduring
liminality
that refuses to come to closure --neither LCHC participants,
including
grad
students, staff, and undergraduate students, nor T&C participants
have
arrived at any definite position vis a vis what we are doing
together.
The
kids get older, new ones arrive, some teens have left, club and group
structures change, entire families move out. UCSD's side of the
story
is
more predictable in the institutional sense of allowing year-on-year
planning of classes and recruitment of students, as well as, of
course,
the
staying power of UCSD as a much longer running process than the
collaboration itself. But this can only explain the brute sense of
our
continued presence, one which would be impossible to impose in any
case,
so
that we still have to try and explain the delicate sense of our
continued
presence --what is happening in the space of this
cross-cultural/cross-**institutional intersection that keeps pulling
together
(in a delicate way) such a heterogenous amalgam of participants --a
constant churn of undergraduate buddies, a more stable set of grad
students, a constant, but slowly changing, stream of kids, Ms. V.,
and
the
few community parents that regularly lend a hand?
You and Andy have said that there must be some kind of crisis, and
this
may
be so, but if this is what is allowing the participants to come
together
anew, it is not the kind of crisis that can be compared to, say,
Occupy
Wall Street, or Greece, or the Arab Spring. It might be that I lack
the
requisite social imagination, but the way I see it, what is special
about
this collaboration is that it holds together without disclosing to
its
participants directly how this is happening. We have been at it for
four
years, and it isn't obvious to me why, as a T&C elder says, we "keep
on
keeping on". This is especially true in light of severe, and
recurrent,
frustrations on every side. For example, in the absence of UCSD
students,
homework does not get done nearly as regularly as when they are there
--this creates a huge problem for Ms. V, who must still try to
satisfy
this
community need in our absence. Sometimes we at LCHC find ourselves
at
odds
with local customs and decisions, to which we nevertheless submit in
order
to keep on keeping on. But where are we keeping on to? (Especially
without access to clear-cut language with which to explain any of
this!)
So, these kinds of open-ended interactional spaces elicit from their
participants a degree of patience that is rarely seen anywhere --more
or
less equally distributed! Southeast San Diego, where T&C is located,
is
not unique in all the ways that its inhabitants are systematically
marginalized, and it is a fact that local community organizers (I've
been
at some of their meetings) look on UCSD and charitable institutions
with
very suspicious eyes. In the face of these realities, mutual
appropriation
is one factor, but not a wholly explanatory one for the loose
holding-together that is going on here.
Whatever the answers are, it is impossible for me to conceive of a
satisfying explanation that does not include affective-imaginative
dimensions. The way I see it, the mystery here is not how
power/structure
shapes discourse/activity, it is why this collaboration holds in the
face
of what would normally be insurmountable difficulties. Good will and
patience all around? Maybe, but this only pushes the question deeper
into
the affective-imaginative life of this collaboration.
Ivan
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 6:26 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
wrote:
Continuing my sharing of the current edition of Theory & Psyhology,
attached are scans of Deborah Downing-Wilson, Robert Lecusay and
Mike
Cole's paper (which I have been so excited about) and the first 16
pages
of
Yrjo Engestrom's paper (I have omitted the case study) which is a
concise
synopsis of his current views on activity and concepts.
Andy
Andy Blunden wrote:
That's a very interesting series of points, Arturo!
Could I just ask you to elaborate a little on what you meant by
"the
unconscious in sign-making" and "the problem of fetishism of the
sign."
I guess that you are right that in almost any social context (the US
included I suspect), the kind of project that Mike writes about can
only be
implemented by surruptitiously moving the goal posts set by the
recognised
authorities, by a kind of subversion, making use of openings created
by
manifest social crisis.
As I'm sure you know, I am in agreement with your critique of the
failure
to satisfactorily "marry" psychological concepts with sociological
concepts, in CHAT or anywhere else for that matter. But doesn't the
kind of
project Mike is talking about, where goals are immanent in the
project
itself, and the project is thoroughly and explicitly collaborative,
go
some
way to addressing this problem?
Andy
Arturo Escandon wrote:
Just wanted to point out that there are places where you cannot
even
think of implementing a simple plain standard design experiment,
let
alone an ad-hoc intervention because educational settings and
institutions are thought to be mere knowledge
reproduction-distribution centers. Research is the job of the
Ministry
of Education. "Joint activity"? What on Earth is that in Japan except
the illusion of freedom framed under top-down cosmological
structure.
I am afraid that most of the cases depicted in the journal are a
reproduction of the cultural conditions existing in few settings,
in
few communities, in a handful of countries. Am I able to implement
an
intervention or mutual appropriation in the Japanese educational
context? No. Am I able to do it in "local communities", yes, but
under
considerable restrictions. However, I am guessing that the most
effective interventions in local communities spring from social
crisis, not from planned activity, that is, some sort of
punctuated
equilibrium in which the community changes or perish.
I am very curious about (1) how the structural constraints and
affordances of organisations themselves shape those mutual
appropriations and how we can account for them; (2) how the
mediating
means themselves are unequally distributed (knowledge
differential):
in order to bridge the differences established by the lack of a
common
repertoire of meanings you have to engage in meaning making, creating
in fact a new differential; (3) the unconscious in sign-making or
using activity. Educational activity brings consciousness at the
expense of bringing unconsciousness as well. I have not read a
single
decisive work addressing the problem of fetishism of the sign, on
which a theory of the uncosciousness could be integrated into
CHAT,
except for works that deal with the problem of "the ideal".
Seeger asks the right questions but I believe there is much more
out
there about ways of marriaging psychology and sociology to give a
better account of agency. At the end, the issues raised by Sawyer
are
still relevant: CHAT keeps operating with a process and
methodological
ontology whereby the individual and the social are inseparable but
does not provide a clear cut language of description of how the
social
structure shapes activity or, to put it in Seeger's terms, how power
shapes discourse (and consciousness and identy).
Best
Arturo
On 10 November 2011 23:41, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
wrote:
The current edition of Theory & Psychology looks very special. I
admit I
have at this stage only actually read the article by Mike Cole,
Robert
Lecusay and Deborah Downing-Wilson, but it is a special issue on
CHAT
and
interventionist methodology, with articles by a number of people
from
Yrjo
Engestrom's CRADLE and also Falk Seeger, who is guest editing the
Special
Issue of MCA on Emotions.
Mike's article elaborates on what the participants call a "mutual
appropriation" approach to developing theory and practice.
Instead
of
implementing a project design and then modifying it in the light of
the
reseacher's experience, the researchers go in to a local community
with
very
open ended ideas about how and what they want to achieve, and
engage
with
their community partner, learn about their (the partner's)
project,
offer
assistance and resources and share knowledge and objectives and
....
mutually appropriate. The article describes the results of a
specific
project which is an exemplar of "mutual appropriation" which has
grown
out
of the 5thD after-school programs which LCHC began in the 1980s.
The article is actually very moving. I personally think that this
kind
of
work is tackling the main problem in front of us
cultural-historical
cultural psychology people today. If you don't subscribe to
Theory
&
Psychology, I don't know how you can get to read the paper. Maybe
someone
has a solution there. But it is a must read. I will read the
remaining
articles in the special issue, but this is a real high.
Andy
--
------------------------------****----------------------------**--**------------
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