Re: [xmca] lave in mca

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

I am attaching a pdf of an article by Ole Dreier which provides a kind of
precis of his book that Jean refers to.  The links to
the references to Gibson in her article in part draw upon Ingold, but Ole D
has book out on objects with Allan Costall that
make those links even clearer.

I am seeking help on finding English language work by Gomes that Jean sites
with approval; its from a book in Portuguese which makes it a little
inaccessible to most of us.

And for those of us who wonder what all of this has to do with CHAT,
consider the non-coincidence that Alexander Zaporozhets,
mentor to VP Zinchenko and part of the circle that included LSV, Luria, and
Leontiev, interacted considerably with the Gibsons.

6 degrees of separation?

mike

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 7:40 AM, Forman, Ellice A <ellice@pitt.edu> wrote:

> I agree with Mike. After reading Lave's article in MCA, I realized that I
> needed to read her new book to understand her position better. Lave, J.
> (2011). Apprenticeship in critical ethnographic practice. Chicago:
> University of Chicago Press. I'm just getting started reading it but I'm
> glad her article led me to it. She makes it clear that critical
> ethnographic practice does not pit writing against activism, as Mike claims
> here. Here's one early salient quote:
>
> "Critical ethnography certainly is engaged in social criticsm and an
> integral concern for social justice . . . But critical ethnography has
> other entailments and layers of meaning as well. It involves a relational,
> historical worldview and metaphysics that question a number of commonsense
> understandings. It envisions ethnographic research as a long struggle to
> illuminate social life, challenge commonplace theories and their political
> implications, and change theoretical practice in the process. This book
> pursues a more ample consideration of what we mean by critical ethnographic
> practice." (p. 10)
>
> Right now I'm in the midst of exploring how Lave's early research on
> tailoring in Liberia led her to pursue these broader and deeper
> investigations of her own apprenticeship in critical ethnographic practice.
>
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf
> Of mike cole [lchcmike@gmail.com]
> Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2012 12:54 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Cc: Jean Lave
> Subject: Re: [xmca] lave in mca
>
> Lave: Changing Practices
>
>
>
> I think it would be a pity if xmca-ites settled for Peter’s
> characterization of Jean Lave’s article as a call to activism, and as
> pitting writing against activism. I did not interpret Jean’s comments as a
> call to march in anti-war-de-jour activities, or join an occupy protest to
> slow down corporate greed.
>
>
>
> Peter commented, in part:
>
>  *Scribner took it to the streets, marching in the marches and such, and
> bully for her. I've got to weigh things differently, I suspect. If I go
> protest la guerre-du-jour, holding my sign at the campus gates, is this a
> cost-effective action? Or is getting my writing done more important,
> especially the public pieces that are read widely, if not terribly
> influentially, at least in terms of current policies? (but then, standing
> at the campus gates with a sign protesting wars or monied interests
> probably has limited payoff as well.) And in my very conservative area, I'd
> no doubt pay an additional cost, such as the outcry against my activism for
> causes that go against the grain of popular opinion.*
>
>
>
> Firstly, the general silence she identified (correctly or not, people who
> were there should comment, but it rings true enough to me) was the absence
> of  “historical specificity and political analysis.”  She then linked her
> ideas to those of Gramsci in the following way:
>
>
>
> *Gramsci’s political account of learning and education (and everything
> else) grew out of*
>
> *his analysis of the “absolute historicism” of philosophy of praxis. He
> pointed to the central engagement of state and private institutions of
> education in inculcating and defending dominant hegemonic relations of
> consent. That is not all that is going on in our complex contradictory
> world, of course. But because virtually all ISCAR participants do the work
> of these institutions, we also need to carry out the political analysis
> that our positions call for.*
>
> * *
>
> None of Jean’s examples of the kind of changes in practice that she
> advocates focused on marching in the streets or challenging the guerre (S!)
> du jour. They did, however, focus on a number of examples (Drier, Ingold,
> Gomes, Holland, and her own) all of which involve the scholar, as scholar,
> engaging in critical analyses of current research practices within the
> professions of which they are a part.
>
>
>
> Overall, the message that I took from the talk/essay was that those who
> adopt what locally we refer to as a CHAT perspective have commitments to
> grounding theory in practices that are supposed to put our theories to the
> test. Her recommendation that we worry about educating the educators, whose
> practice is education, seems to me completely uncontroversial. Her positive
> cases seem uncontroversial as recognizable lines of scholarly research some
> of which has been discussed in this forum (we should “take  seriously the
> understanding of research as craft, and of both learning and changing
> identity as aspects of craftsmanship" for example).
>
>
>
> I do not know nearly enough about most of the examples that Jean holds up
> as potential models to follow. It seems that remedying my ignorance about
> those examples would be a productive place to start. For sure, the serious
> problems facing all forms of education, but in the case of most of us,
> institutionally, the problems facing higher education, are acute and
> getting worse very rapidly. Jean’s summary of that situation seems to line
> up with my own knowledge of events, but perhaps that is because we are both
> present for the dismantling of what was once a great public university.
> Much less clear are lines of theory/practice research that would/could make
> a difference.
>
>
> Anyway, there is a serious call here for a fundamental, critical,
> theory/practice orientation to our work. Answering this call IS a political
> as well as an academic act. It may also be a warning that the privileged
> lifeworlds of academics that those of us over 30 years of age have
> experienced may be in danger of disappearing faster than the ozone layer.
>
> mike
>
> (Ps- sorry for the funny font gyrations. Cut and pasted from a word doc.)
>
> On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 6:00 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>
> > I'm going to assume my unappointed role as discussion-launcher for the
> > Lave article in MCA that was voted as the feature discussion article on
> > xmca. I may not be able to stick around for long, as we're going on
> > vacation Saturday in hopes that somewhere on this earth we can find a
> place
> > that's not as hot as Georgia, USA.
> >
> > Lave's paper is based on her plenary closing talk at ISCAR in Rome, an
> > even I did not attend. As an aside, as long as it's held in
> mid-September,
> > shortly after our fall academic semester begins, I and others like me
> > probably won't attend. It's just too ill-timed to miss 1-2 weeks of
> > classes, depending on location, right after getting the semester off the
> > ground.
> >
> > Lave references several ISCAR talks she found compelling, so it's nice
> for
> > us non-attenders to get a sense of what she found valuable in Rome.
> >
> > If there's an overriding theme to her paper, it might be that
> > cultural-historical researchers ought to be more involved in social
> > activism. I was struck while reading the paper by how she could easily
> have
> > used Silvia Scribner as her role model for the talk, even though SS goes
> > unmentioned. A month or so when I wrote to the list about my reading of
> her
> > collected papers, I noted that her activism on the labor front probably
> cut
> > into her writing time, although perhaps her career was conducted before
> > electronic media made expectations for writing much greater-there were
> > fewer journals and fewer book publishers, and writing itself was much
> more
> > laborious (a point related to the recent discussion of writing) in that
> it
> > was often undertaken by pen, then retyped, and ultimately less amenable
> to
> > revision than it is these days.
> >
> > She urges social activism, although the paper is general enough to allow
> > for individuals to take that appeal up in their own ways. Academics are,
> to
> > some, "above" ideology, and so should avoid the fray; yet most of us here
> > would agree with her point that all thinking is ideological, and so being
> > an activist on important social issues is a natural extension of our
> work.
> > If we are all ideological in our thinking, research, and writing, and if
> > social issues are shaped by ideology, should we not then contribute to
> the
> > shape of  social issues through what we know via scholarship? (and how's
> > that for a Western logical syllogism.)
> >
> > Scribner took it to the streets, marching in the marches and such, and
> > bully for her. I've got to weigh things differently, I suspect. If I go
> > protest la guerre-du-jour, holding my sign at the campus gates, is this a
> > cost-effective action? Or is getting my writing done more important,
> > especially the public pieces that are read widely, if not terribly
> > influentially, at least in terms of current policies? (but then, standing
> > at the campus gates with a sign protesting wars or monied interests
> > probably has limited payoff as well.) And in my very conservative area,
> I'd
> > no doubt pay an additional cost, such as the outcry against my activism
> for
> > causes that go against the grain of popular opinion.
> >
> > I hope these concerns are not too concrete for Lave's fairly abstract
> > call-to-peaceful-arms about social activism. For those of us in fairly
> > conventional academic positions (Lave's seems to allow for much more
> travel
> > than mine), activism has to be balanced against other considerations and
> > demands on our time and local reputations. At this point, I'm more
> > persuaded by the general thrust of her views than of possibilities for
> > real-world activism whose consequences are greater than I can produce
> > through my writing.
> >
> > OK, there you go, your turn.
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
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> >
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