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especially central to any others. Its practice is restricted and membership contained, neither contagious nor diffuse. On the other hand, learning mathematics is multiply naturalized across several powerful communities of practice (mathematics and science teachers and practitioners). At the same time it is both strange and central to others (central in the sense of a barrier to further progress). It is also diffused through many kinds of practices, in various classrooms, disciplines, and workplaces (Hall and Stevens 1995). Some communities of practice expect it to be fully naturalizeda background tool or a substrate-infrastructureto get on with the business of being, for example, a scientist (Lave 1988). There is no map or sense of the strangeness of the object, however, across other memberships. Here, too, information technologies are both diffused and strange with rising expectations of literacy across worlds. |
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These relations define a space against which and into which information technologies of all sorts enter. These technologies of representation are entering into all sorts of communities of practice on a global scale, in design and in use. They are a medium of communication and broadcast as well as of standardization. The toughest problems in information systems design are increasingly those concerned with modeling cooperation across heterogeneous worlds, of modeling articulation work and multiplicity. If we do not learn to do so, we face the risk of a franchised, dully standardized infrastructure (''500 channels and nothing on," in the words of Mitch Kapor from the Electronic Frontier Foundation) or of an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance. |
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Feminism and race-critical theory offer traditions of reflective denaturalization, of a politics of simultaneity and contradiction intuited by the term cyborg. Long ago feminists began with the maxim that the personal is political and that each woman's experience has a primacy we must all learn to afford. Feminism went from reductionist identity politics to cyborg politics in less than twenty years. Much of this was due to the hard work and suffering of communities of practice that had been made monstrous or invisible, especially women of color and their articulation of the layered politics of insider-outsider and borderlands. One part of the methodological lesson from feminism read in this way is that experience-experiment incorporates an ethics of ambiguity with both modesty and anger. This means that how we hear each other is a matter of listening forth from silence. Listening is active, not passive; it means stretching to affiliate with multiplicity. In Nell Morton's words, this is "hearing to speech": |
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