[xmca] Activity and Context: An idea

XMCA-ites: Here is an example of what I meant by sending a note about a
recent "new idea."

At a symposium on qualitative research organized by Martin, Michael Roth
gave an interesting talk that builds on the article we all discussed
a while ago with respect to his paper in MCA. It generated the following
line of thought that you might find interesting.

A bit of background.

In the Lave and Chaiklin book *Understanding practice: perspectives on
activity and context, *which is full of interesting and still relevant
articles,
Yrjo asserts that "the activity is the context." I am forever puzzling
about the concept of context, and Michael's talk seemed to provide a very
clear reason for not reducing context to activity, at least as activity
(another famously polysemic word!) is applied in Michael's article.

The activity in this case is farming salmon and steelhead in order to
maintain levels of these fish in the rivers of British Columbia. As those of
you
who participated in the prior discussion may recall, one of the interesting
topics in Michael's paper is how emotion and cognition are intertwined in
action, and action is, of course, constituent of activity. There are several
interesting issues connected with the example, but the one that caught my
attention in this case was that in talking about the intertwining of emotion
and cognition in Erica's actions, Michael remarked that her overall
emotional state was influenced by the fact that there was downsizing of the
workforce of fish culturalists for macro economic reasons and that
Erica was particularly upset because the forces that were downsize fish
farming also forced her husband out of an unrelated job. So she and her
husband faced unemployment simultaneously.

This example seems to show clearly that for some purposes it is important to
think about activities with respect to their contexts (using context here in
the concentric-circles, "that which surrounds" version). I commented to
Michael that activity systems are inherently open systems, and that it made
sense, when the influences "from outside" where clearly influencing the
dynamics "inside" to make a distinction between activity and context.

If this is boring to you, my apologies. If it is interesting, what do you
think? And in either case, what interesting-to-you idea has occurred to you
recently?

mike

PS-- *Ignacio:* I will gather up a few segments from the Vygotsky monograph
and post them. Having to prepare to talk a little about the
concept of imagination and listening to others talk about improvisation and
play evoked other ideas for me, but enough from me for now.
Your turn, and others as well. What's new in your thinking these days?
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Received on Sat Mar 29 09:55 PDT 2008