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About XMCAThe Mind, Culture, and Activity Homepage describes
itself (June 24, 2000) as:
... an interactive forum for a community of
interdisciplinary scholars who share an interest in the study of human
mind in its cultural and historical contexts. Our emphasis is research
that seeks to resolve methodological problems associated with the
analysis of human and theoretical approaches that place culture and
activity at the center of attempts to understand human nature. Our
participants come from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology,
cognitive science, education, linguistics, psychology and
sociology.
Central to the organization of activities in the community
is the Laboratory of Comparative Human
Cognition (LCHC) at University of California, San Diego. LCHC
publishes the Mind, Culture, and Activity journal (MCA) and sponsors
XMCA, an e-mail discussion group.
This homepage seeks to integrate a variety of activities in
the community into one on-line resource. On this page you will find
links to current and past issues of MCA, on-line discussions from the
XMCA mailing list, personal profiles of our participants, and links to
other related Web sites. We invite all people interested in any aspect
of our activities and research to contribute to a common dialogue among
e-mail discussants, journal subscribers, and interested
researchers.
The electronic forum based at LCHC, and with
research interests in Activity Theory and Cultural-Historical approaches
to psychology has a history on the Net that goes back to 1984. The list
was originally named XLCHC, and the Welcome Message used on the list
between 1991 and 1995 describes it like this:
XLCHC came into being in 1984 as a medium for discussion of
research on learning and development with a general concern for issues
of education in modern technological societies and a special concern
about the ways in which educational systems are a source of socially
engendered social inequality. The "call letters" of this discussion
group (to borrow terminology from another medium) indicate its initial
goals. LCHC is the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, a research
unit founded at the Rockefeller University in the early 1970's which
moved to the University of California, San Diego in 1978. Until 1984,
LCHC had an ethnically diverse faculty that conducted an active
post-doctoral program in the use of comparative methods for studying
culture and cognition with special interest in problems of learning and
development in school and non-school settings. By 1984, two years into
the Reagan-Bush era, we had lost virtually all of our minority group
faculty, our research concerns were explicitly rejected by federal
funding agencies, and we were denied post-doctoral funds on the grounds
that there was insufficient minority group faculty. :-)
XLCHC was one response to this non-benign neglect. The "X"
in the title had a dual significance: First, it was meant to provide a
medium for continued interaction and cooperation by the many visitors
and post-doctoral fellows with whom we had interacted in the past, that
is, for "ex-LCHCers." Second, it was meant to provide a broadened
constituency for discussion of the issues traditionally associated with
the Laboratory by including scholars and graduate students from around
the world who wished to participate.
Within-site Xlist links
- Some descriptive statistics
from the Xlists.
- A paper
of mine from 1998: Contact, Community, Multilogue
- A paper
of mine from 1999: The Emergence and Decay of Multilogue on a
Scholarly Mailinglist
© Eva Ekeblad, June 2000
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