presession CHAT

Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Fri, 24 Apr 1998 12:22:02 +0200

At 14.17 -0500 98-04-23, Jeong Suk Pang wrote:
>From: David Kirshner <c1474 who-is-at er.uqam.ca>
>Subject: Re: AERA and Friere
>
>Let me add my voice to the call of others who lacked the
>time, money, or opportunity to meet F2F with many of our
>listserve family at the activity theory presession of AERA.
>A sense of the dynamics of the presession as a whole, as well
>as personally memorable moments, would be most appreciated.

If only I had time... (since the presession was what I really attended,
being only a sparse gatecrasher at the actual AERA) ... but today being my
last day at the LCHC there isn't much.

But, to start from the beginning, on Saturday afternoon: for starters Mike
Cole did the "basic CHAT presentation", using Arne Raeithel's genealogical
chart over the ancestry of CHAT as a mediating artifact:

It does show the tangled nature of the relationships between the Russian,
the German and the US philosophers/ /psychologists, from Kant, Hegel, Marx,
Peirce, Ilyenkov... and on.

Somewhat to my own embarrassment I found myself jumping up to pint out the
technicalities of Arne's notational inventions in the chart: which lines
were only showing similarities, without confirmed historical influence,
which lines were supposed to represent a polemical relation and which were
showing inheritance. Relations father to son. And also to point out that
some of the choices of who was in there, and who not, were dependent on the
context of publication (see Ref).

When Mike asked the sessioners for missing links & missing authors, I found
it entirely appropriate of Mary to observe that the chart was indeed
men-only.

Mike has already mentioned the alternative chart of a scholarly diverse
landscape produced by Mary Bryson and Suzanne deCastell in the break before
their presentation on Sunday. It was only there as a backdrop, though --
comparing the two charts COULD have been a whole session of its own: both
as to the two sets of people, and as to the structure: one hierarchical in
its historicity, the other one painterly in its clusterings.

Eva

Ref:

A.R. chart from: 1992 Activity Theory as a foundation for design. In
C.Floyd, H. Z=FCllighoven, R. Budde & R. Keil-Slawik (Eds.), Software
development and reality construction (pp 391-415). Berlin: Springer