Randomness and Happenstance

This week, I am thinking deeply about the ways that I have come to conceptualize identity thus far. Each of these readings pushed me in new ways to consider the shortcomings and limitations of my personal conceptualizations (especially as I reflect on my synthesis paper). I found the article by Leander and Frank (2006) to contain the most salient and transparent descriptions of how they are defining identity.  They write, "identity cannot be conceived in either macro (social and cultural) or micro (psychological) units, but must rather be thought of as always in circulation between intensely personal and powerful social forces" (p. 186). When I first read this, I thought…wait, how is that so different from what we've read previously? Doesn't that sound the same as the way that Holland et al (1998) defined identity in figured worlds? As I read on, I came to find that Leander and Frank (2006) were drawing on Holland et al (1998), too (that was a relief…I'm not going crazy…yet :)) as they come to consider hybrid identities in practice and lamination.

Still, I wondered, I'm supposed to be finding something new that includes novel ideas about identity. Why isn't there a different definition in here? What am I supposed to be discovering? That's when I realized that it wasn't only the definition, these researchers were using to describe what identity is but also the way that researchers theoretically and methodologically oriented their pieces that spoke to how they accounted for these macro and micro units happening altogether. A single line stuck out to me from Leander and Boldt (2012) that spoke to the way these research projects were situating identity. It reads, "it matters not only where we look but also when we look where" (p. 27). This spoke to me as I am thinking about nonrepresentation emergence (rhizomes) and assemblage theories as placing an emphasis on the unknown, the constant state of unpredictability that we live in and when we choose to enter into explorations of aspects of identities in the research, recognizing that these performances are tied up within a never ending multitude of possibilities that lack organization and happen to come together in particular ways.

In addition to this exploration of when, I also am focusing on the theme among these articles to decenter the text in literacy explorations of identity. Leander and Frank (2006) emphasized this major point in their departure from the New London Group and the research aspect of this departure was apparent in the ways that Leander and Boldt (2012) explored Lee's identity throughout a single day. It was Lee's being in time and space, often a randomness and happenstance, that created various identity performances. Much of this involved his interactions with his reading of Manga but many of his identity moves did not. In this way, I came to see Leander and Boldt's (2012) emphasis on the text as a piece of the identity performance that viewed "texts [that] are artifacts of literacy practice but do not describe literacy practice itself" (p. 36).

The freshness this brings to my lens of exploring identity centers on this idea of messiness and randomness. Kuby and Vaughn (2015) describe the process of attempting to capture these moments as "literacy desiring" in which the researcher accounts for the "unfolding, unexpected, agentic and in-the-moment aspects of creating multimodal artefacts" (p. 435). As I consider my own future research, I often think about the messiness of my former classroom and the ways I might go about doing research in that classroom. Especially as I think about the learners who I seek to represent, I can't help but be cautious about how much I interpret or assume based on what happens in specific interactions with identities, moments of agency and systems of power. This post-structural orientation that Kuby and Vaughn (2015) describe as historically being situated in issues of power but also encompassing departures from the expected and notions of becoming almost provides me with a sense of relief. Yes, it is ok that the research is and will inevitably will be messy. So goes life.

I'll leave this with one final thought. Perhaps the most profound statement I take from all of these articles came from Kuby and Vaughn (2015) who wrote, "any identity that a child enacts is always partial" because we are constantly performing and negotiating "particular aspects of our identities but other aspects might not be revealed" (p. 442). In the messiness, we perform parts of ourselves…not all of ourselves. We choose to translate ourselves in certain ways and those around us translate us simultaneously (Alim et al, 2016). Some of these identity negotiations and co-translations are conscious. Some aren't. It is in accounting for the randomness and partiality of our shifting existences that I am coming to consider the role identity plays.

Raciolinguistics Post

Raciolinguistics and Transracialization 

We live in an American society that Alim (2016) describes as "hyperracial" and "hyperracializing" (p. 3). With each passing semester, each doctoral course and subsequent new media coverage, I am becoming increasingly aware of this phenomenon. Recently, this was made even more apparent to me by an international student from Ghana (in a different course) who described experiencing racism in the U.S. for the first time.

At first, "I didn't know what was happening to me," he shared with the class. "I had never experienced racism before, so I didn't know what it looked like. It wasn't until later on and through my future readings in my courses that I came to realize what I had actually experienced." This vignette and deeply personal experienced highlighted for me the uniqueness of the hyperracializing atmosphere interwoven throughout the fabric of the United States.

Raciolinguistics has added a critically important layer to this hyperracializing as Alim (2016) also writes that "language is often overlooked as one of the most important cultural means that we have for distinguishing ourselves from others" (p. 4-5). It is through the use of language and listening to one another's language that we come to racialize people. In the first chapter of the book, Alim (2016) goes on to specifically name this phenomenon as transracialization, which he describes as an alternative to the explanation of America as postracial. Instead, transracialization is defined as the ways in which race is fluid. Transracialization is not only about the ways in which we position our own selves but also the ways in which we are interpreted and positioned by those around us. In this way, identities continue to be co-constructed and negotiated, as has been much of the theme of this course. This theme of transracialization stuck out to me as I read across the various research projects in my section of the text.

The most jarring statement that Alim (2016) made for me was this idea that transracialization is about "doing" and "undoing" race at the same time (p. 47). I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea as I think about what this might look like in classrooms. It seems I'm not alone in my uneasiness as Alim (2016) also goes on to state that everyone should be afraid of what this might mean for the future, but, he adds…not too afraid.

There is a specific quote I am pulling on, surprisingly in the same chapter, as I consider how raciolinguistics might look in classrooms, or perhaps, more specifically, transracialization. Alim (2016) writes,

"How can we destabilize restrictive and regressive notions of race when the struggle for racial equality requires racializing oneself in order to be treated justly; to be 'counted' and to 'count' and to receive resources, aid, legislation, educational reform, and so on?" (p. 46)

This quote reminds me of the ways that we were grappling with what Flores & Rosa (2015) described as a critical heteroglossic approach where they describe Estela, a doctoral student often targeted and misunderstood by her professors. They write, "What if the problem is not Estela's limited communicative repertoire but the racialization of her language use and the inability of the white listening subject to hear her racialized body speaking appropriately?" (p. 161). I'm grappling with these ideas of a heteroglossic approach and how they tie in with transracialization as we move in and out of the doing and the undoing of race and language or language and race and of languaging race (specifically my section of the text).

Last class, we watched the video NEA put out for culture, equity and education (NEA: Culture, Equity and Education). We discussed the multicultural orientation of the video (specifically Sarah's point) and its reification of whiteness and white ways of knowing and being in classroom spaces. This video seems to suggest a need to jockey for acknowledgement in classroom spaces, to "count" as Alim (2016) puts it. As I sit and try to respond to "how might this look in classrooms," I'm stumped. What is the balance, tension and pedagogical approach for doing/undoing race, using a critical heteroglossic approach and also recognizing that there are a multitude of students who have yet to be counted?

Week 7 Post

Digitally Mediated Literacies

The articles this week really have me thinking about the affordances and limitations that digitally mediated literacy and more traditional material literacies have when thinking about the way identities are performed, represented and become visible over time. In some ways, as I was reading Wargo's (2017) piece, I began considering how material literacy and digital literacies might offer similar affordances. For example, in his study of photographs, Wargo (2017) noted that photos are ways that people (specifically LGBTQ youth) might choose to represent their identities as fluid. So, I thought. One could do that with a physical picture (using a camera as technology/digital layer, of course) and a scrapbook/photo album or one could do that via a digital platform (such as Tumblr in the article). The key difference for me was the affordance that digital media offers in terms of watching identities shape, form, shift and even contradict one another over time (p. 572). For this reason, I was particularly drawn to the way that researching digital media platforms allows a researcher to attempt to unpack these shifts in ways that perhaps could be done with traditional material literacies but not nearly with the speed, date/time stamp reliability and additional layer of user comments/feedback which add depth to the co-construction of these identities.

Pieces I also enjoyed from Wargo (2017) were his discussion of the discursive approach (Bucholtz & Hall) that included mediating and semiotic meaning making, positionality and indexicality. I'm pulling specifically on indexicality as I think about digital platforms and the ways that users might overtly mention specific categories or labels with which they identify but also how users might choose to situate their posts within specific hashtags which then get sucked into an even larger figured worlds of other categories/labels and the taking up/performing of identities.

I build on this idea of indexicality and seemingly thinking about identities as sedimented as taken up in Wargo's (2017) piece to consider intersectionality theory as described in Compton-Lilly et al (2017). I think that perhaps this idea of intersectionality theory is one of my favorites as it is letting me think about the way our identities might really just be viewed as one big jumbled mess, or, as intersectionality theory puts it more nicely…networks of self which involve, "intersectional identity negotiations that can be tracked across time, providing information about how identities are contextualized, negotiated and renegotiated" (p. 122). As I think about this idea of intersectionality, then, I go back to the ways that some of the digitally mediated artifacts in Wargo's (2017) research seemed to represent disagreements or conflicting views between one another and/or the described identities participants shared in interviews. Perhaps, using intersectionality theory as a guide, we might consider how these pictures represent negotiations and renegotiations over time within one's network of self as opposed to mere contradictions.

Transitioning…

This was probably my favorite quote in thinking about the link between identity and intersectionality and its implications for classrooms:

"Theories of intersectionality blur the possibility of simple causal arguments that connect race, class, culture, and/or language to academic inequity. Intersectionality reveals the complexities of children's identities and the ways in which literacy learning overlaps with, interacts with, and entails multiple ways of being that cannot be untangled" (Compton-Lilly et al, 2017, p. 136).

To consider ideas of academic inequity and the ways that these inequities are tied up in very complicated systems that cannot be untangled, I began thinking about the ways that Black young men are represented in research as literate…or, more often, failing in their literacy lives. This, then, leads me to the Haddix and Sealey-Ruiz (2012) piece in thinking about the way digital literacy is taken up in classrooms as representations of identity but also as a legitimate literacy practice. I began thinking about the ways Anna is using Padlet in her classroom with her students to offer students a place to use digital media unique to their interests and their own identities. In this way, she gives students agency as Anna mentioned that she doesn't want her students to be bogged down by all staring at the same website. How lucky Anna's students are, I thought, as I considered spaces and classrooms that do not receive or think about specific digital literacy platforms in the same way. I've actually read a few articles now about what Haddix and Sealey-Ruiz (2012) raise as a specific concern for classrooms not valuing and even demonizing the use of certain technology (read: especially cell phones) as a literacy tool. In other spaces, though, especially affluent, largely White classrooms, the use of something like a cell phone is not seen as a "dumbing down of students' literacy skills" (Haddix & Sealey-Ruiz, 2012) but rather a resource that recognizes and legitimizes that literate lives students lead across their figured worlds.

What are the implications for attempting to shift pedagogy toward a "framework for freedom" (Haddix & Sealey-Ruiz, 2012, p. 191)  that values the use of digitally mediated literacy tools, especially in classrooms where students' own literacies have never been valued?

Week 6 Post

Sedimented identities, Habitus and Capital

"'Becoming literate is as much about the interaction one has with others around oral and written language as it is about mastering the alphabetic system'" (Bartlett, 2007).

This was my favorite quote this week. The setting and participants in Bartlett's (2007) study immediately brought me back to much of the love I have for Freirean thinking. The way Bartlett framed the study, though, is what had led me to consider how ideas of literacy practice, identity and artifacts related to my own students. This idea of attempting to "seem" literate that can look starkly different in varying spaces made me think about the way my students performed their identities in different ways during different times of the school day. I'll stick with the same student I began talking about in class last week as a specific example.

Drew very regularly participated in what Holland described as forming and performing his identity in practice (cited by Bartlett on p. 56). He did this by using cultural artifacts that were material and conceptual. Drew was very in tune with reading the clothing, language choices/styles, gestures, gait patterns and hairstyles of the students in his high school that he referred to as the "big kids." This single sentence contains a combination of cultural artifacts that are both material and conceptual. He saw his construction of "big kids" (applied to nearly 1,500 students in the school who did not attend class with him) as a group possessing a great amount of cultural and social capital which made them extremely literate in the comings and goings of high school life. Here, I find it valuable to bring in the game analogy that Compton-Lilly (2014) offered:

"While people are not consciously following rules as they engage in everyday life, they are strategically competing for resources, positions, and opportunities. Being successful in the game is easier if 'one is born into the game' and has embodied ways of being, or dispositions, that are valued within the field" (p. 376).

In an effort to obtain more social capital, having not been born into the 'able' game so many of his peers had been, Drew used artifacts readily available to him (that held significant meaning for him) to attempt to "seem" and "feel" literate (Bartlett, 2007) in a figured world that had very specific sets of rules and expectations, differing drastically from the literacies of an academic space.

To continue to stick with this example, I'll bring in the concept of Habitus (Bourdieu) that Drew participated in in this specific social context outside the classroom. Drawing specifically on the figure we discussed in class, I'm thinking about the way that Drew's ways of being, doing and acting changed across time and space (Roswell & Pahl, 2007). Drew entered high school as a transfer student, having just moved in with a new foster family. After a few months, he began to realize that there was a different social order to the space in our classroom than the space in the broader high school (specifically the cafeteria). This, in turn, led to his use of artifacts (this is a significant digression and oversimplification for the purpose of getting to the point). Drew changed his gait pattern in an effort to imitate what he thought was "cool walking." Sweatshirts were extremely important because he could have the hood up-an important act of resistance since having hoods up was strictly forbidden in the school. On and on his use of artifacts went.

Cultural artifacts as sources/tools for agency (resistance)

Then…something happened in this habitus. Two young women who Drew considered to be "big kids" invited him to sit at their lunch table. This shift in practice was not something that came out of thin air but was rather impacted by the small moves made by Drew over time. This, in turn, impacted his structure of interaction with peers. He had gained limited social capital (especially over those with whom he attended class) which came with new ways of interacting, being and becoming alongside these young women and the peers in his classroom. Still, Drew's habitus hadn't changed in as drastic a way as he might of liked.

He gained limited acceptance and access to these new peers. His access to their lunch table did not mean that they considered him someone "literate" enough in their social practice to hang out with after school or with whom they'd exchange phone numbers. Rather, he was permitted access to their lunch table as a limit of his habitus, which, as Compton-Lilly offers (2014) lies in "historical and social conditions" (p. 375). Drew's diagnoses and the historical and social implications and conditions accompanying these as well as his positioning in the school put limits on how literate he could be or be considered in this group. As much as Drew attempted to seem and feel literate in this space with these people, the amount of capital he could gain was held down despite his best efforts.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

I'm going to shift here, perhaps leaving this part of Drew's every-evolving story very unfinished, but as I'm thinking about sedimented identities (Rowsell & Pahl), I'm also considering the kinds of texts Drew produced in the classroom that represented his layered identities over time. I mentioned above that Drew came to the high school where I worked after he had arrived at a new foster home. Drew is perhaps the student I think of most vividly when I consider how sedimented identities appear through artifacts we produce.

Drew had a strong preference for Thomas the Tank (read: the paradoxical nature of "big kid" implies that Drew, then, potentially sees himself as a "little kid"). Drew also had a history of emotional and physical abuse from both his biological family members as well as historical abuse from other foster guardians. He often demonstrated anger in the classroom, refused to conform to the expectations of authority figures and participated frequently in acts of resistance (e.g., putting his hood up purposefully to defy rules imposed on him). All of these aspects of his identity, and many more, appeared in the texts he produced (which were most often a combination of picture and written text).

Drew's text productions and designs often referred to a very specific episode of Thomas the Tank in which the trains are demonized.

His designs included him in the narrative, referring to himself most often as a "demon boy." For me, these texts and memories were concrete examples as I'm trying to hold onto this idea of "laminated" and layered identities (Holland & Leander-as cited by Rowsell & Paul). How were the ways that Drew was performing and forming his identities play into his designs? How were these "finished" artifacts representations of his sedimented identities?

Drew is multidimensional and he continued to make meaning of himself through his texts as he worked through many of the aspects of his identity that had been co-constructed based on his participation and positioning in the various, often drastically shifting figured worlds he has occupied over the course of his life. This was a representation of his habitus in texts which as Rowsell and Paul (2007) write, "can be understood as being a way of conceptualizing the way in which households bring particular ways of being and doing to a number of sites and these sites include representation as well as practice" (p. 395). The way Drew was, is and continues to become are shaped in the representations he produces as well as the practices in which he engages.

Week 5 Post

This week, I found the jutxtaposition of  the pieces by Street (2013) and Knobel & Lankshear (2014) to be excellent jumping off points in reminding me of some of the aspects of New Literacies with which I'm already familiar and then pushing my thinking to include pieces I had either let fall away from memory or had never considered.

A piece of Street's (2013) piece that I found extremely helpful in framing how I read new literacies this week, was this idea of literacy practice as opposed to a literacy event. This idea (largely resulting from Heath-excited to hear more about her next week from Beth!), that a literacy event occurs within the social models of literacy that readers bring with them to an event or literacy encounter was a theme I saw throughout. To put it more eloquently in Street's (2013) words, new literacies consider literacy practice to be "not only attempts to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy events, but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind" (p. 78). For me, this statement incorporates issues of identity, agency and power.

We come to literacy practices, having experiences that have shaped and formed our identities. The shaping, authoring and re-authoring of those identities occur within the context of broader cultural and social processes, which, in turn, provide us instances of agency in resisting or conforming to the ways in which our identities are co-constructed (thank you, figured worlds). The degree to which we have access to opportunities for agency and re-authoring in our cultural and social contexts, though, is largely impacted by existing power structures.

But wait…

When I think about New Literacies, I thought I was supposed to be focusing in on technology???

 

Enter: Knobel & Lankshear (2014)

I was happy to have read this piece second because Street (2013) did a nice job of setting me up with some grounding theoretical ideas to then enter this piece. The biggest takeaway I added from Knobel & Lankshear (2014) was framing New Literacies as focusing "on ways in which meaning-making practices are evolving under contemporary conditions that include, but are not limited to, technological changes associated with the rise and proliferation of digital electronics" (p. 97).

Ahhhhh, I see now (at least I think I see…for today). The mistake I had made in interpreting New Literacies was a lack of acknowledgement of the way that meaning making occurs in contemporary conditions. I appreciate the vagueness of this language because it allows me to think about how identities may be interpreted in contemporary ways differently than they ever have been before. For example, Anna began mentioning a GSA beginning at her school last week, and Christina brought up the importance of fluidity in queer theory. New Literacies, then, allows me to think about how someone in Anna's school might author and reauthor themselves very differently in a school setting today (contemporary times) than 20 years ago (or maybe not). What this theory is letting me think about more is time. In our conversations related to figured worlds, we discussed the importance of reaching into the past and being aware of future self, but I don't think I paid as much attention to the idea of "contemporary" in the same way this theory is allowing.

Finally, there were a few key points that I took away from Knobel & Lankshear (2014) that strongly filtered my reading of Wohlwend (2009). This idea of New Literacies having a different "ethos" from traditional literacies was particularly powerful, specifically this shift in literacy practices that are more participatory and collaborative in nature rather than individually-focused. This willing collaboration, then, which Knobel & Lanksehar (2014) linked nicely to literacy worlds within technological spaces, values input from others who are not necessarily experts related to the authoring.

Without Street's (2013) initial frame and Knobel & Lankshear's application of these ideas to cyberspace, I don't know if I would have read Wohlwend's (2009) piece through a New Literacies lens. If I'm not mistaken, I don't know that she states that she's drawing directly on New Literacies, but rather frames her theoretical lens as a "critical sociocultural approach." Then, I thought, but wait…that describes exactly what new literacies is. DUH.

After reading Wohlwend's (2009) first few sections, I was like, GIRL, you've got so many theories tied together in here. Please write my synthesis paper for me. Mediated discourse, social semiotics, cultural studies of media, feminist postructuralist perspectives on girlhood…and she wove them so well!

What I took from this piece, within the frame of New Literacies, was the idea that this small group of little people, acting often as a collaborative group and valuing the input of their peers over experts (i.e., teachers or movie creators), entered into these various activities (as used by Wohlwend's model) in very contemporary times, which, in turn, framed the way they played out these literacy practices. I'm specifically thinking about the film that Zoe authored near the end of the piece. She was actively resisting identity norms that have been authored by large multi-million dollar production companies as to what it means to be a princess. She does this in school but she also brings with her larger cultural and social experiences that frame her literacy practices. She collaborates with her peers (to a certain extent) to negotiate meaning in the contemporary times in which she lives, adding layers to her identity as well as those around her.

Week 4 Post

As I begin to write this post, I'm not exactly sure how to structure my response in a way that will equitably include all of the readings while addressing each question in an organized way that doesn't span pages and pages of content. That said, I'm going to talk briefly about three of the readings and what stuck out to me in terms of the questions at the beginning of my post and follow that with a more in depth analysis of the article that was of particular importance for my learning this week.

Childhood Figured Worlds: Navigating Figured Worlds as white British and British Pakistani

Something I really appreciated about this piece from the start was the way that Barron (2013) included a rich amount of detail when outlining the driving theoretical framework for this project. As I entered into reading about the ways that the children were navigating their figured world school but also larger social contexts based on their ethnic and racial experiences, I was struck by the statement that figured worlds can be "helpful in supplementing how young children's ethnic identities have been conceptualized by critical race theorists and socio-cultural theorists" (Barron, 2013, p. 2). For me, this connected to how we've discussed the way using figured worlds in research might pair well with other theories, even, in this case, conversations from multiple paradigms.

The positional and figurative identities that the children performed during this research project were "constantly in complex interaction with each other" (Barron, 2013, p. 10). For example, Barron's (2013) example about Mitchell's rationale for not celebrating Eid because he's "not dark" was an example of using his positioned identity of whiteness to assign the way he participates in cultural experiences.  This specific example not only included his identity but also the way he is interpreting his figured worlds and the sociocultural norms accompanying those worlds that ultimately hold power over which individuals "are supposed to" celebrate certain holidays and which are not.

As a result of these socially constructed norms that the children interpreted, Barron (2013) writes,

" only particular figured worlds were available to the children for much of the time. The children had few, if any, opportunities to make things up from scratch" (p. 14-15). The connection, then, to the ways these sorts of "access" points interweave themselves into whose knowledge is valued in schools and whose isn't was an important lead in to discussions of power within these figured worlds and how they potentially play themselves out over long periods of time in granting and denying access to students.

Materiality and Power in Teacher's Figured Worlds

As I was reading the Gelfuso & Dennis (2017) piece, I was particularly aware of the questions related to the ways that artifacts and power enter into figured worlds. Specifically, for this research study, that happened to be the figured worlds of life as a teacher as well as the figured world of teaching and learning literacy. Rather than rehash the entire study here, I'll highlight two important moments.

Within the discourses analysis of the conversation between Sherry and Megan, the central theme that emerged was discussion of materials. These physical and tangible artifacts seemed to drive the conversation between the two, serving as central to the "teaching and learning" aspect of the figured worlds. The tie in, then, to the ways that these specific materials were driven by district standards, which were often "checked up on" by those in positions of power, was insightful in thinking about how much of focus physical materials can become.

The sociocultural norms that existed in this space dictated the importance of materials as well as using practical knowledge to drive instruction. While not specifically honing in on the identities of either of the participants, this study did make me wonder about the ways that identities of teachers are performed in the figured world of school spaces. That also, then, led me to wonder the ways in which teachers might use agency in classrooms to resist or conform to the existing power structures. In the case of this 20-minute conversation, it appears that both Shelly and Megan were complicit in conforming to expectations. But were they? Wouldn't it be necessary to ask them questions about the way they navigate expectations in order to glean insight?

Resisting Heteronormative Norms through Artifacts

Before I even begin to unpack here, I'll start by saying I really enjoyed reading Blackburn's (2002) piece. Of all that I read for this week, the piece seemed to flow so nicely and read almost like a story.

As Blackburn (2002) unpacked the figured worlds that Justine occupied within the context of the research (i.e., school and youth center), the ways that "authoring" was used in this piece was something I appreciated when discussing the way agency was enacted. For example, Blackburn (2002) writes about the way Justine authored herself into the first poem where she shifts the use of the word "dyke" from how she is positioned as a young woman of color identifying as a lesbian into a different figured world in the poem where she had agency to fight the hatred that accompanied her lived experience with that word. Not only does she write the poem, though, as an act of resistance against powerful heteronormativity, but she goes a step further by reading it aloud to a group in which she can be empowered by those around her.

The ultimate example of the artifact produced by this piece culminates in Justine's video that she chooses to share in both of her figured worlds. In this piece, she combines artifacts within artifacts (e.g., photos and words within a video) in an act of agency to validate her identity in a figured world where sociocultural norms indicate that her identity as a lesbian is problematic.

Grappling with Manufactured Differences in Separate Figured Worlds

I'll end with a reflection on Bagatell's (2007) piece since the content of the research study was the closest to my researcher heart. There were several methodological moves that I really appreciated about this piece. I thought the decision to report findings through narrative was especially insightful in demonstrating the ways that the two different figured worlds in the article (i.e., living in the "neurotypical" world and living in a world with other individuals with autism) was helpful in seeing the ways that artifacts, identities, power and sociocultural norms all worked together within each of these spaces.

Throughout the narrative, Bagatell (2007) successfully highlights the multiple ways that Ben is positioned within his dominantly viewed identity of being someone who "has autism." The reader sees the often ignored aspects, especially within the disability world, of mental health and depression that accompany being positioned in social spaces as an outcast or someone who needs to "conform" to "being normal." The reader then sees Ben's attempts at enacting agency as a younger child when he discusses actively resisting the sociocultural pressures to "act normal" which, he later decides, are sometimes pressures he will conform to in order to engage in social relationships with peers. 

Soooooo…now that I answered some of the questions about this piece…I wanted to offer critique about the way that Bagatell (2007) portrays these figured worlds.

First, Bagatell (2007) offers no framework though which she's going to discuss disability which, for me, is an essential element if you're going to do this kind of research. Disability as a concept or label or IDENTITY goes unproblematized and unexamined. Based on the way the piece presents, I'm inclined to say that Bagatell (2007) is using a medical model of disability to do this work, which, in my opinion is problematic.

This is why: (the video is a bit long but does a nice job of explaining the medical v. social models of disability if you're not familiar):

Secondly, throughout Bagatell's (2007) discussion, there is a definite development of the "neurotypical" figured world that Ben occupies (which, presumably, so does Bagatell). Power structures and sociocultural norms are outlined and the ways that Ben resists and conforms are brought to light. The discussion in this piece, though, of the figured world in which Ben goes to interact with individuals who share his diagnosis in really underdeveloped. There is discussion about the ways that this figured world is more comfortable for Ben and how there are differing sociocultural norms in place. However, there is only 1 statement I could find in the entire piece that mentions issues of power in which Bagatell (2007) highlights that those with "higher functioning" autism have more control than those who are "lower functioning."

Based on my experience with this world, there are far more existing power structures than this. The way it is presented in the piece, this figured world is "paradise." In a lot of ways, it may have been positioned that way based on Ben's lived experience in his less desired figured world. However, the ethnographic work on this end seemed weak to me in that there was a lack of exploration into the ways that communities of individuals who have aspects of shared identities are also governed by rules and often driven by conformity. 

Week 3 Post

Figured Worlds

In coming to the concept of figured worlds, I am exploring the idea of considering different spaces, contexts or worlds I occupy as uniquely constructed entities or "realms" as Holland et al (1998) describe them. Within each of my distinct yet often overlapping figured worlds, I co-construct, along with other agents (people) the amount of importance that is assigned to certain specific actions through the emotions and feelings assigned to those actions.

Whew, is that a lot to try to hold still?!?

With that working definition, then, I am seeing a clear link (relatively clear, as all this is :)) between activity theory and figured worlds. In their description of the intersection of these ideas, Holland et al (1998) refer to figured worlds being "formed and re-formed" as we engage in everyday activities (p. 53). They go on to discuss the ways in which figured worlds serve as abstractions. So, for example, in considering the figured world of academia, specifically the space we occupy as part of the figured world of doctoral students in the College of Education at Mizzou, no one activity in which we engage (e.g., gathering important theoretical knowledge via coursework; teaching undergraduate courses to gain experience, etc.) is the definition of that figured world. Rather, it is the increasingly abstract nature of these activities together that shape the way we come to know, describe and move through our shared figured world.

I found it insightful that Holland et al (1998) emphasized the importance of analyzing people's activities rather than trying to "theorize at the figured world level" (p. 57). Last week in our small group, Sarah, Edwin and I were discussing how one would take up activity theory in an educational space. Which activities do you observe and why? How many activities inside of activities inside of activities are necessary to observe and study in order to say we can make some claims about our observations? I think that I was posing some of those questions because I, unknowingly, was emphasizing theoretical conclusions at the figured world level, rather than focusing on the importance of individual activities (which certainly are embedded within and amongst one another). This week's readings are helping me rethink those initial questions. 

Materiality

As I try to incorporate ideas of artifacts and materiality into figured worlds, I want to focus my discussion here around objects as tools. I do this intentionally because my analytic gaze (thanks for introducing that phrase to me last week, Angie!) so often emphasizes d/Discourse. While clearly I want to maintain the importance of talk, discourse and body language as central to the conversation of artifacts, I also want to push myself to think more about materiality this semester. So, in thinking specifically about how artifacts contribute and subsequently help create the figured world of life as a doctoral student in the College of Ed at Mizzou, I'm specifically drawn to thinking about the role that my laptop, specifically the brand of my laptop, played in helping to construct that world.

Before I began my doctoral work, I had always been a PC user. The first computer my parents bought was a Gateway. I had a Dell in college and subsequently was given another Dell while working for my prior school district. I walked into my first doc seminar and noticed something as I sat with and among my peers. There were Macs everywhere! I read this artifact/tool/object as something that contributed to the construction of this figured world I was just entering. By the end of the course, I had invested in my own Mac (about which I have absolutely not regrets). To me, this artifact speaks to the ways in which materials shape figured worlds. 

                                      

Identity, Agency, POWER

"Identity is one way of naming the dense interconnections between the intimate and public venues of social practice" (Holland et al, 1998, p. 270).

I found this to be an important idea as I was wading through the ways that identities are co-constructed (maybe that's even too dualistic sounding…multiply constructed?) within figured worlds. First, I found the idea of historical landscape to be particularly important when discussing identity. Holland et al (1998) point to the importance of recognizing that history exists within the landscape of a society but also at the individual level of a person. Therefore, I do not completely reconstruct my identity from scratch each and every time that I enter a new or existing figured world. Rather, I bring with me both my historical and overlapping identities as well as the conscious or subconscious history of society (perhaps too broad a term).

To unpack these ideas, I found myself arriving at the dichotomy between the concepts of "positional identity" and "narrativized or figurative identities" (Holland et al, 1998, p. 127). I'll use the same example of life as a doc student to discuss how I'm thinking about each of these.

So, in this doctoral figured world, my positional identity would be my understanding of the ways my social position shifts and changes depending on the other players in my world. I select and choose specific linguistic forms to which I have access in order to navigate the daily instances of power and power structures that I encounter. Perhaps I do this through a specific set of predictable actions (e.g., I remember which professors want to be called by their full title and which are cool with first names; I jump through the hoops of forms and paperwork; I pump egos that seem to need pumping, etc.) but, sometimes, I use agency in a way that requires me to improvise (Holland et al, 1998). My improvisations, then, are unpredictable but not uninformed. I use agency in ways that are interconnected to the identity I've formed with artifacts, power structures and other characters in my figured world. 

My narrativized or figurative identity within this space, then, might be related to the stories that exist within the figured world. As Holland et al (1998) describe this identity, they describe it as the "generic" version. So, as I'm thinking about this description of identity, I'm wondering if it would fit the way that students are discussed collectively or perhaps even individually in faculty meetings. Perhaps this would also include the way my identity is interpreted by others, since positioned identities are interpreted by self (but that could be an overgeneralization). Even more broadly, perhaps my figurative identity doesn't include much about me, specifically, at all. Perhaps my figured identity is more about the ways a doctoral student passes through the university and creates a narrative of the experience alongside other seemingly homogeneous doctoral experiences.

Further Wonderings

As we really delved into talking about different ways to describe identity this week, I'm wondering how everyone else is thinking about the concept of "self." Last spring, in Philosophical Perspectives of Social Science Research, we spent a lot of time discussing whether or not each of us has an actual "self," a core at the center of us. Is there something that stays consistent within us over time or are we constantly using aspects of certain identities that intersect with new identities and at the center, there is just this mess of identities? I'd love to hear how others might think about this idea.