Studying Places/Spaces

CI5410, Fall, 2007

Identity, Agency, and PowerIdentity can be considered an enactment of self made within particular activities and relationships that occur within particular spaces (geographic, social, electronic, mental, cultural) at particular points in time. These enactments are always situated in and constitutive of histories and of power relations. (Moje, 2004)

Agency might be thought of as the strategic making and remaking of selves; identities; activities; relationships; cultural tools and resources; histories; and possibly, but not necessarily, relations of power. Agency is always socially and culturally produced, and enacted within structures of power. (Moje & Lewis, in press; Lewis & Moje, 2004)

Power is produced and enacted in and through discourses, relationships, activities, spaces, and times as people compete for access to and control of resources, tools, identities. Power can constrain, but does not necessarily prohibit agency. (Moje & Lewis, in press, Lewis and Moje, 2004)

An Activity Perspective What is the activity? What are the tools used in the activity? Who are the participants? What are the goals of the activity? What is the activity system? Who are the participants? What are the goals of the system? In this activity, who acts/talks?  When?  How?

What is the content of their utterances, and how is that content shaped by the activity?  The relationships?  The tools?  The activity system?

How do the actions (talk and other actions) vary across participants?

What do people learn in this activity?

Critical Discourse Analysis

What are some of the features of this social activity?

What discourses (or ideologies) surface in this discussion?

What social identities are enacted in this exchange (through language use, discourses, generic features, actions)?

What relations of power are enacted and/or produced in this exchange?

How are these power relations locally produced?

How are these power relations tied to and reproductive of larger systems of power?

What aspects of the talk, silence, or action could be considered agentic? How? Why?

How Do Identity, Agency, and Power Shape Learning? (Moje & Lewis, in press)

What is learning? (Another tentative definition)~~ Learning is the acquisition or appropriation of, the resistance to, and/or

the reconceptualization of skills and knowledge that have the potential to make and remake selves, identities, and relationships, and

Learning is ways situated in participation within discourse communities.

If discourse communities produce and struggle over cultural tools, resources, and identities (both within and across communities), then learning is shaped by power relations.

Therefore, agency, which is about the power to control how one’s self, identity, relationships, etc. are made and remade, is critical to understanding learning and to mediating learning environments.

Performance Theory• What positions, spatial or discursive, do

participants take up in relation to each other?• What positions, spatial or discursive, do

participants take up in relation to the text?• What social codes are available to participants

in this context?• What ways of talking, not talking, acting are

performed in this exchange? What do these ways of talking, not talking, or acting suggest about individual or group identities?

• How are these performances tied to larger systems of power?

Agency: drama: adopt perspectives of expert Allows students to

experience what it means to be perceived as expert or authority

Step out of familiar “student” role to adopt a “professional” role

Learn to cope with dialogic tensions and challenges through verbal arguments

NCLB: use of genres associated with engaging in formal debate

The value of place-based learning: Knowledge Robert Brooke (ed. Rural Voices, NCTE),

“If we understand our local place well enough to grasp how it came to be this way, the forces that shape it, and how it compares to other places, we will have developed a robust and extensive knowledge base” (p. 63). 

Place--> Meaning of Space Place: the actual physical site, event, or

activity in lived or text worlds Space: the meanings we associate with place

Subjective Autobiographical Social/cultural Power

Frames: Phenomenological: Subjective Attachment to place: Uniqueness

Uniqueness vs. homogeneity and standardization: “McDonaldlization” (#1 in sales in France)

What if everything looked the same? Celebrating the local: challenge top-down

imposition of corporate sameness and standards as standardization

Michael Perry: Population 456: subjective New Auburn I am happy here, but my gravitation to place has

always been balanced by my need to move. I crave a contrapuntal mix of shiftlessness and stability. In bed at night, I can hear the trucks out on the highway. Sometimes a driver drifts across the white line, and when the tires hit the rumble strip, the rubbery howl makes me want to drive away in the night, fills me with the urge to go west, makes me think the finest sort of freedom is found at sunrise in a South Dakota rest stop. Contentment, it turns out, can be a matter of global positioning.

Subjective: affiliation: insider versus outsider “The Laundromat,” Larry WatsonThey hate us here and why not.We’re the summer people,The cottage owners, lake dwellers,The city folks, the flatlanders, here to use every washer and dryer and on no specialSchedule….You can tell , they’d like to say, bag your clothes and wash them at home,wear them dirty, beat themon a rock for all we care.But they can’t they don’t darebecause we buy our groceriesfrom Howard at the IGAAnd our malts from Tutt’s Tastee Freeze

Poems about place: Steve Athanases, UC,Davis Milwaukee suburb

Home: safe/pastoral Focus: beyond the

local Travel, cars

Focus: seasons Critique of sameness

and consumerism

Urban CA. Home: danger Focus: the local

Parks, street corners,community

Little about nature Critique of poverty

and challenges of urban life

Frame: narrative or autobiographical Stories about a place

Autobiographical recollections Family histories Fictional versions Tall tales Creation myths Documented historical accounts

Perry: time: rural development

Today, when I see the cornfields sprouting duplexes and hear my neighbors mourning the loss of the family farm--a decimation that began in the 1980s and is now virtually complete--my gut sympathies lie foursquare with the displaced farmers, but I can’t help but think that this land has been lost before.

Pedagogies of Place: Design (Ellsworth, 2005) “The experience of the learning self in the

times and places of knowledge in the making, which are also the times and places of the learning self in the making”

Places “speak to and about pedagogy indirectly through design…[they are] things in the making [that] provide us with a ‘zone of historical indetermination’ that allows room for experimentation.”

Maya Lin: Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial

Linking internal imagination and external reality Lin: “I create places in which to think, without

trying to dictate what to think.” Pedagogy: “must create places in which to

think without already knowing what we should think.”

Place “confronts us from outside the concepts we already have, outside the subjectivities we already are.”

Public versus private spaces Rec Center: “face-time”

“having one’s ‘face’ recognizing by another person or being able to see the face (or body) of a person whom one might be interested in meeting.”

Positioning: “opening-lines” Strutting: attention to oneself Timing: being there at the “right time” Transgressions: stalkers, roamers, lurkers

Frame: Categories: regions/groups Geographic categories/regions

“Suburbia”/”urban”/”rural”/”small town” “Midwestern,” “Southern,” “West”

“Small town” “Dying” main street businesses: WalMarts Value of sense of community

Moje: Latino youth: hybrid identities in different spaces Different neighborhoods

Space for building ethnic identities Texts/dress for identification

Malls: sense of being “different” “Space for othering and being othered”

Virtual spaces: lowrider.com “The ethnic community space of their lives remained

dominant in their textual choices and literacy practices.”

Frame: affiliation markers: Perry: lawn art In New Auburn, as in any place, lawn art is a form of

public display as simultaneously trite and revealing as bumper stickers and nose rings. Between the porch and the road, iconography sprouts: the bathtub Madonna, the milk-cow windmill, giant mushrooms carved from stumps, yellow Norwegian Crossing traffic signs--these images speak to who we are.

Small-town Minnesota Summer Festivals Ron Lavenda: Cornfests and Water Carnivals Celebration of town unity/coherence Display of expertise/resources

“Corn Days” Socialization of new members Queen’s Pageant

Demonstration of commitment to town values Gender identity associated with traditional values Assuming the role of representing the town’s idealized

expectations for young people Pleasure at witnessing commitment to conforming to

these expectations

Regional spaces: Mediated by popular culture: “Wild West”

“Wild West” portrayed in cowboys, Indians, 10-gallon hats, saloons, guns, horses, frontier, ghost towns, tumbleweeds, ranches, sheriff, dirt, wind, dreams coming true, glitter and gold, Hollywood, movie stars, the pull of California etc.

Regional identities: values Living well/valuing ecology/biology Civic involvements

Know about/actively address local issues Sense of economic worth

Know local opportunities Spiritual connection to place Belonging to a community

Regional identities Being someone from a certain place/ region Cheryl: “Therefore, I realized my racial identity was so inextricably connected to the space in where I grew up. Indeed, Los Angeles, itself, helped me identify who I was, and when I venture beyond its border, I realized my racial identity lost its meaning.”

Melissa Cook: Texas to LA Gendered/culural spaces

Gendered space: Japanese department store

Reynolds: women and space: safety/control Domestic spaces: oppressive Public spaces: unsafe Neighborhoods in music videos:

Male spaces Feminist geography/ecocriticism

Classed space: Bettie: cultural capital and class “Hard-living” vs. “settled-living” habitus

Lack of continuity/support “White-trash” smokers: marginalized

Behavior: it’s there choice to behave Awards ceremony: celebration of preps Excluded from social school networking

Hard-living: poverty/instability Problematic: Ruby Payne: culture of poverty

Shift from structural factors to blame on the “pathological” values of “poor families”

Sense of unfairness but not framed in structural, systemic terms Blame victims vs. economic/political system Lack of stable attachment to schools

Housing/changes: no consistency

Raced spaces Suburbia/Exurbia: Whiteness: “white

flight” Homogeneity: fear of diversity Segregated/gated communities Political power shift: state legislatures

Cuts in funding for urban areas

Whiteness: positioning White privilege/safety

Assumed as the invisible norm Order, rationality,self-control, power

Colorblind racism: “we’re all the same” Local pedagogy:

Understand race/power relationships How one learned about race Resistance to interrogating privilege

Costs of segregation Sheryll Cashin,The Failures of Integration: How

Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream

Racist real estate policies: “desirable neighborhoods”: higher housing prices

Gary Orfield (Harvard Civil Rights Project: will be at UCLA in 2007): housing segregation and schooling

McDermott: Meaning of white identity: context dependent Observations: white/black interactions in

convenience stores in similar working-class neighborhoods: different histories

Atlanta: no sense of working-class/ethnic solidarity Whites perceived as “failures”

Boston: privileged as working-class whites Strong positive identification with neighborhood

Interracial interactions in the stores Misperceptions/stereotypes “Jane (white) interacts with Sue (Black) as

Sue--until Sue mentions her white boyfriend, or mistakedly insults Jane, or mentions the trouble her child has with the law; then Sue becomes a black person, and a whole set of group-based stereotypes can be activated. Conversely, Sue interacts with Jane as Jane, until Jane remarks about “those people” moving into the neighborhood…”

Frame: ecological perspectives on space“There is a real world, that is really dying, and

we had better think about that”-Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country

Jut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World--most resources depleted by 2060

http://www.mediaed.org/videos/CommercialismPoliticsAndMedia/Advertising_EndOfWorld

Analyzing music/media fan spaces as “scenes” or “zones” Scenes: Spaces to play

Buffy nights: fan responses in a bar Fans sharing of knowledge/expertise Monty Python's Spamalot

Bedroom culture as a “zone” Soundscapes, memorabilia, multi-tasking, work

Music club as spectacle: “zoning out”

Three types of spaces (Soja) Firstspace: Actual physical place Secondspace: Intellectual/Imagined

spaces Idealized versions of what spaces

should/could be Thirdspace: tensions between actual

and imagined

Space and positioning How one is positioned by the spatial

aspects/artifacts/social practices Higher education: position working-

class student as marginal Fails to consider Thirdspace, borderland

tensions between ideal and reality of working-class students’ lives

Frame: Power in space: Positioning/stance How am I being positioned to respond to this experience, event, or the text?

Do I accept or reject how I am being positioned to respond?

What are the different “modes of address” Ellsworth?

Border Theory: physical/cultural borders US/Mexico borderlands

hybridity, hierarchies, colonialism Bejarano, C., (2005) Que onda?: Urban

Youth Culture and Border Identity 4 year ethnography: high school Chicana/o vs. Mexicano youth Distinct social spaces in the school

De Fina: social categories and narratives Narratives reflect schema “Membership Categorization Analysis”

Local practices in using categories Being “Hispanic”: Mexican workers Defining properties of categories Relations with others

Storytellers: being Hispanic: discrimination

Erdreich and Rapoport, Reading the Power of Spaces: Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew

University Employed spatial literacies to transform

oppressive spaces for own agency Coping with borders between

official/legal practices and resisting practices

Time: Canyon alternative high school program Different uses of time from “official

school chronotope” Late passes, Saturday school, catch-up

work “factory/efficiency time” vs. “science time”

Value of alternative time schedules Official school time controlled, segmented,

decontextualized, contained

Janette: narrative chronotope Carnival space: challenge to traditional

norms Soja’s “thirdspace”: alternatives to official

second space chronotopes Identity of “tattooed freak” “Girls Room” poem: rejection of traditional

focus on appearance

Mauk: Gordan Community College “Students, themselves, in an academic

third space are the intersection of academic and nonacademic spatialities--defined by their own bodies” Interview people outside of school on

issues of education Nature of work in different places How to correspond with politicians

Mauk: focus on nonacademic vs. academic spaces Online spaces vs. campus spaces Online writing feedback: U Writing

Center http://writing.umn.edu/sws/appointments.ht

m Writing about nonacademic spaces

Campano, Immigrant Students and Literacy First mandated classroom space

Official instruction Second classroom spaces

Students’ interests, leads, desires, stories Before/after school, lunch, homes, etc. “Funds of knowledge” outside official

school spaces

Lakoff: menu mediated “minor identities” Knowledge of food types: markers of cultural

capital and ethnic differences Chez Panisse vs. Oriental Restaurant

Relationship between space and identity “Expectations of character, interaction, and role to

be played; the menu merely validates and underscores those assumptions and sets the stage for the main act, the food and eating of it, again according to personal expectations.”

Chez Panisse: tonight: $100.00 A Dinner with Christine Campadieu of the

Domaine de la Tour Vieille Grilled leeks and chicories with Catalan sauce Baked Atlantic cod with black olives and garlic Cattail Creek Farm lamb shoulder braised in

Grenache wine with almonds; with potato and celery root purée and winter greens

Warm chocolate fondant with toasted hazelnut ice cream

Ethnography methods Adopting an “outsider” “Martian” cultural perspective

Problem: being a fish in water Adopting an insider “emic” perspective

“Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar” (Erickson)

Finding insider informants Extensive observations: fly on the wall Interviewing Understanding practices as reflecting

discourses/cultural models High school study: Cultural models of physical and intellectual

control in the school

Field notes: Fieldworking Focus: selective perception Verbal snapshots: 5-10 details Descriptive vs. general language People’s practices/appearances Use of photos/videos: digital storytelling

“Ethnography of a University”: video clips Triangulate: cross-check with others

Mapping spaces Where things are located What type of people are sitting with

whom (race, class, gender) People’s body positioning/relationships

Leander: classroom maps F-formation: position of lower body Facing versus turning away

Immersing: Fast Food Restaurant/Cafeteria Take dual-entry field notes on left side about specific

aspects of the Décor, people, conversations, ordering rituals, language

Map the site noting who sits where; who interacts with whom and how

Reflect on the right side next to specific notes on the Cultural norms, roles, beliefs, assumptions Social interactions between people One’s own relationship to the place Sense of how you are positioned

Social construction of spaces as relational

Physical positioning: power relations Leander study: Naureen’s English class in

an alternative school-within-a school “Derogatory Terms Activity”: Huck Finn Language/power relationships List words used to put down others Put words on a banner

Interviewing Developing questions based on prior

research about the person Asking “grand tour” questions about the

overall “big picture” experience Asking open-ended vs. yes/no questions Follow-up questions to foster elaboration “Pointing” interviews to focus on specifics

Analyze transcript: Interview with your participant the amount/rough percentage of time each person

talked the turn-taking and topic focus the kinds of speech acts employed by each person the voices adopted reflecting certain roles or stances

and how these voices or stances positioned you or your participant (Ribeiro and Schiffrin chapters).

adoption of any discourses reflected in these voices or stances

the influence of the interview genre itself nonverbal cues/markers on the exchange.