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Why should computer scientists read African-American poets? What does information science have to do with race-critical or feminist methods and metaphysics? The collective wisdom in those domains is one of the richest places from which to understand these core problems in information systems design: how to preserve the integrity of information without a priori standardization and its often attendant violence. In turn, if those lessons can be taken seriously within the emerging cyberworld, there may yet be a chance to strengthen its democratic ethical aspects. It is easy to be ethnocentric in virtual space; more difficult to avoid stereotypes. The lessons of those who have lived with such stereotypes are important, perhaps now more than ever. |
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People who belong to more than one central community are also important sources for understanding more about the links between moral order and categorization. Such "marginal" people have long been of interest to social scientists and novelists alike. Marginality as a technical term in sociology refers to human membership in more than one community of practice.
53 Here we emphasize those people who belong to communities that are different in key, life-absorbing ways, such as racial groups (see our discussion in chapter 6). A good example of a marginal person is someone who belongs to more than one race, for example, half white and half Asian. Again, we are not using marginality here in the sense of center-margin or center-periphery (e.g., not "in the margins"), but rather in the old-fashioned sense of Robert Park's marginal man, the one who has a double vision by virtue of having more than one identity to negotiate (Park 1952, Stonequist 1937, Simmel 1950 [1908], Schütz 1944). Strangers are those who come and stay a while, long enough so that membership becomes a troublesome issuethey are not just nomads passing through, but people who sort of belong and sort of do not. |
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Marginality is an interesting paradoxical concept for people and things. On the one hand, membership means the naturalization of objects that mediate action. On the other, everyone is a member of multiple communities of practice. Yet since different communities generally have differently naturalized objects in their ecology, how can someone maintain multiple membership without becoming simply schizophrenic? How can they naturalize the same object differently, since naturalization by definition demands forgetting about other worlds? |
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