[This is a contribution to the CHAT-SIG discussion on themes for the next
AERA .... a nominated theme was identities and subjectivities in CHAT and
a possible speaker being considered is Dorothy Holland ...]
I looked a bit into Dorothy Holland's work (of course I've come across it
in the past, but not the recent work) at:
http://www.unc.edu/depts/anthro/faculty/fac_pages/holland.html
where she describes:
Present Research: My theoretical interests revolve around identity, agency
and social change, particularly social movements. Several colleagues and I
have just published Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (1998, Harvard),
a book, which along with a co-edited volume, History in Person: Enduring
Struggles and the Practice of Identity (2001, School of American Research
Press), articulates a social practice theory of identity. Two previous
co-edited volumes, The Cultural Production of the Educated Person (1996,
SUNY) and Selves in Time and Place: Identities, Experience and History in
Nepal (1998, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) pursue similar issues in
relation to education and in Nepali studies.
The above projects, "Estrangement from the Public Sphere," and the study of
the U.S. environmental movement, are large, collaborative ventures. Both
projects investigate the new conditions for political and cultural activism
and the importance of environmental issues in the public sphere. They also
ask how social movements inhabit people's lives, becoming not only viable
communities of practice but enduring cultural forms of desire.
Not too much of this directly deals with education, but perhaps that would
offer a useful counterpoint at AERA. Though among her writings there are:
Levinson, B., D. Foley and D. Holland, eds. (1996). The Cultural Production
of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local
Practice. (State University of New York Press)
Holland, D. and M. Eisenhart. (1990) Educated in Romance: Women,
Achievement, and College Culture. (The University of Chicago Press)
Interesting also is the theoretical work growing out of this, from
Holland, D. and M. Cole (1995) Between Discourse and Schema:
Reformulating a Cultural-Historical Approach to Culture and Mind.
Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26(4):1-16.
to
Holland, D., and J. Lave (2001), eds. History in Person: Enduring
Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities (The School of
American Research Press)
I would also be very happy to listen to Deborah Hicks talk about the fits
and misfits between her work on Bakhtin and CHAT approaches.
I had the feeling at ISCRAT that a lot of people, especially younger
researchers, want to hear some CRITIQUE of classic CHAT approaches and some
sense of WHAT ELSE we should be looking at and how to add it to, modify,
transform, transgress from the models that are now dominant to those that
will come next .....
I think that many people in the field believe that issues of identity,
subjectivities, and their dialogical construction within
culturally-historically specific activities, as well as their
transformative potential for such activities, for culture and for history,
are important areas to talk about more in a CHAT context. Seeing identities
as relational invokes the activities, the inter-linked different
activities, across which our interactions with various partners, in various
roles, make us the persons who act in these activities as we do. The
trajectories of individual lives, and group biographies, weave connections
across activity types and sites, sometimes in new ways that play a role in
sociogenesis, cultural change, and history.
I was particularly fascinated by a brief mention previously of focusing on
atypical life-trajectories, the role of the transgressive in making change.
Whoever has interesting things to say on these matters is who I'd like to
hear talking in Chicago ....
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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