Good Morning/Afternoon,
A. I am new to CHAT and xmca, and was introduced to both by a friend a
few months ago. I am attracted to CHAT because it deals with formations
and transformations: It allows making visible how individuals and groups
can contest and construct their 'activities and identities.' It is able
to 'see in action' people, institutions, materials and objects (CHAT and
non-CHAT objects!), symbols and norms, motivations and emotions, and
events and outcomes in time and space.
B. I have enjoyed this forum because of experiencing 'fresh air' in
your virtual space --You come across open, friendly, generous, and
flexible --Although, I remain unengaged with the many details of your
discussions that sound too technical from 'outside.'
C. The Foot article made CHAT touchable for me, and the Leander article
made me excited by showing the spatiality of the conflicting
'activities' and their corresponding transformative 'identity'
formations. Perhaps CHAT should now be called Cultural Historical
Spatial Activity Theory! (In this way, your theory has all the three
windows that Edward Soja talks about --social (including cultural),
historical, and spatial.)
D. my background is in architecture, urban/regional planning, and
sociology of development. For the past decade, I have been conducting
local program evaluation of human services in the San Francisco Bay
Area. I find CHAT concepts applicable to program evaluation and would
like to experiment in applying them. (eg, it seems to me that concept
of 'activity' can include a social program, with its layers of division
of labor, its actual and virtual tools, changing points of view of
different players, and the time and space dimensions.)
E. I will attempt to summarize what I understood of the comments by
mike and Jay on Leander's article in below. Since I am new and CHAT is
only partially on my radar, please excuse my misunderstandings:
Mike emphasized 3 important points:
1. Layered activities/identities: '... school within a school (and a
project-based activity for that alternative school) provides
opportunities for expansive learning and transformation of identities in
productive ways.'
2. Spatiality of activities: [these activities simultaneously are]
'spatially distinct "contexts" in CHAT research in addition to temporal
sequence.'
3. Transformations (actual/social and virtual/cultural) as outcomes of
conflicting activities: 'The productivity of interactions among
simultaneously existing activities (polycontexts) arises in good measure
from conflicts among them.'
Jay described some spatial qualities as:
1. Spatial/social differentiation: 'What's big about space is that
it's differentiated ... places are different, what we do in them is
different, places are furnished to afford different kinds of activities,
2. Space is produced by history: 'places are a kind of collective
memory of history . The social geography of space is not necessarily
fixed ... the activities we engage in can create new sense of linkage
and of relative distance/nearness among spaces/places. . The social
geography of space is not necessarily fixed ... the activities we engage
in can create new sense of linkage and of relative distance/nearness
among spaces/places. '
3. Sociality is shaped by spatiality: 'Places help in social
reproduction.'
4. Spatiality is open ended in quality and quantity: 'Places can be
changed, new places made, maybe new kinds of places made (virtual spaces
online?).'
5. Spatiality (real and imagined, after Soja)is ubiquitous: 'what's
big about space/place is that we move from one to another, and in some
senses can be in more than one at once (virtually) and in terms of one
space inside another
6. Space is universal but place is local; constructing meaning in and
of space by 'making place' out of space: ' .in terms of how a place
means for us, etc.) We articulate or link or laminate different
spaces/places with each other, and so does our society. Spaces and
places have social relationships to each other as well as strictly
geographical relationships. help us figure out something about how we
integrate (or don't!) various activities, and that includes how we use
already existing relations among places/spaces to help us articulate one
activity with another.
Jay ended with interesting observations and important questions:
What if space is not differentiated? '... imagine a spatially
homogeneous world ... where every place was more or less like every
other, where buildings consisted of identical rooms, identically
furnished, where there was no point in going to the mountains or the sea
because all landscapes looked the same'
It will probably be like SimCity or Orange County in Los Angeles!
How spatial differentiation is produced and transformed? How do we cross
boundaries in our global process of geographically uneven development?
'How diverse would we expect the activities and cultures of such a world
to be? And why is our world not that way? And what do we do that makes
it more so and less so? And what do we do that depends on what is
specific within each places? and what do we do that depends on moving
across the differences between one place and another?'
Warm Regards,
Iraj imam
iimam@cal-research.org
The Center for Applied Local Research, Richmond, CA
"the only thing worth globalizing is dissent" Arundhati Roy, 2002
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