A tribute to Bill Hart-Davidson

Yesterday I got a call from a mutual friend, telling me that Bill Hart-Davidson had passed away. I was shocked. 

Bill and I had known each other since at least 1999, when both of us received our PhDs and went on the job market. In the very early 2000s, we were put on the same SIGDOC panel along with Mark Zachry, and the three of us got to talking afterwards. (I already knew Mark well, since he had been my office mate at Iowa State). Soon the three of us began collaborating, writing a streak of conference papers from 2006-2012 and conducting research about our shared interest in how people communicate and mediate their work via texts. 

We stopped our regular collaborations after 2012, as each of us began pursuing other research interests. But we still made a point to see each other at conferences and to seek counsel for sticky problems. In fact, the last time I contacted Bill, it was to thank him for some feedback he gave on an article I was trying to write.

Since we were the same age, we did a lot of things in tandem. For instance, I remember talking to him at SIGDOC 2007 (El Paso) about the fact that I had begun ashtanga yoga to get back in shape. He had recently begun biking for health reasons. Around that time, we both picked up bass guitar -- although he stuck with it and I didn't. We both became involved in our departments' digital writing labs. And eventually we both picked up service obligations, with Bill becoming the Associate Dean of Research & Graduate Education at his university.

But we diverged in other ways. While I am introverted, Bill was always outgoing and deeply interested in people -- qualities that made him a great teacher, but also a great leader. He did a stint in Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) leadership and became an ATTW Fellow. While I was researching entrepreneurship from a safe distance, he became an entrepreneur, co-inventing Eli Review: peer review software that is now being used at colleges and universities. Bill was endlessly interested in how to push the field forward, and as a result, he seemed to know everyone -- and at least a little bit about everything -- in it.

So Bill touched a lot of people's lives -- as an outstanding professor, an associate dean, an entrepreneur, a bass player, and on and on. He was always gracious, always enthusiastic about people's projects, and always focused on amplifying what worked rather than tearing down what didn't. Our field has lost someone really vital -- but more importantly, all of us have lost a good friend. I just can't believe he's gone.

Reading :: Doing CHAT in the Wild

Doing Chat in the Wild: From-the-Field Challenges of a Non-Dualist Methodology
Edited by Patricia Dionne and Alfredo Jornet

In this 2023 collection published by Brill, the contributors consider the question of what cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) demands from empirical research methodology. How do we study human practice in a way that is consistent with CHAT, which implies “a non-dualist ontology and epistemology” (p.vii)? In the preface, the editors argue that CHAT presumes investigating praxis “in terms of the way singular persons, the members of practice, are internally connected to collective society, that is, to practice itself,” and they add that “this premise poses a major departure from all other classical frameworks and methods, where connections between persons and their societal ‘contexts’ tend to be treated as two different, self-contained factors or elements that need to be externally connected” (p.vii). Thus the impetus for this volume, in which CHAT scholars such as Patricia Dionne, Alfredo Jornet, Anna Stetsenko, Beth Fernholt, and Ritva Engeström discuss how they handle the challenges of field research in their own work.

Those who aren’t in CHAT, but who read the above description, may wonder to what extent CHAT really “poses a major departure from all other classical frameworks and methods.” I think the words CHAT and classical are doing a lot of work here, frankly: We see similar themes in other strands of practice theory, in non-CHAT distributed cognition and situated cognition approaches, and arguably in actor-network theory and others in the new materialist vein. Depending on how we interpret “internally connected,” we may see resonance more broadly with some strands of ethnography and ethnomethodology. But perhaps these are not considered classical? I had a hard time finding the specific boundaries the editors were trying to draw here, and it’s possible that they kept these a bit vague so that the contributors, with their variances, could fit comfortably into the collection. Of course, it’s also possible that I’m just not steeped enough in the literature to pick up what the authors are laying down.

Let’s forge ahead into a few of the chapters.

Chapter 1. “From-the-field challenges of a non-dualist methodology” by Patricia Dionne and Alfredo Jornet (pp.1-14). 

In this introduction, Dionne and Jornet note that CHAT is “today one of the most often cited sources in research concerne with the social and cultural dimensions of human thinking and praxis”; although its “ontological and epistemological premises are still highly debated,” “the framework’s aim to achieve a non-dualist, developmental methodology is hardly contested.” Yet how do we concretely implement such research? “What are the concrete challenges faced in the pursuit of a non-dualist approach in actual inquiry?” (p.1). 

The authors briefly review CHAT in research, noting that “the use of the CHAT term is contested,” sometimes (as in this book) referring broadly to approaches rooted in the Vygotsky Circle, sometimes more narrowly referring to approaches based on Yrjö Engeström’s work (p.2). Still, “All CHAT inquiries … investigate human matters of praxis in terms of the way singular persons, the members of practice, are internally connected to society; that is, to activity itself” (p.2). In contrast, they say, all other classical frameworks and methods treat “connections between persons and their societal ‘contexts’ … as two different self-contained factors or elements that need to be externally connected” (p.2). (This critique reminds me strongly of Latour’s critique of classical sociology in Aramis, but the authors don’t cite that critique here.) The authors say that this difference has been discussed broadly in the literature, but “the concrete, lived world of methodological practice however remains largely unaddressed in the literature” (p.3). To address this gap, the authors included researchers using specifically CHAT methodologies such as Change Labs, Transformative Activist Stance practice, the Clinic of Activity, and social design experiments (p.4). The authors overview these contributions.

Chapter 2. “Knowledge production as a process of making mis/takes, at the edge of uncertainty: Research as an activist, risky, and personal quest” by Anna Stetsenko (pp.15-45)

In this chapter, Anna Stetsenko outlines “the transformative activist stance,” in which “knowledge production is a part of human becoming understood to be about people contributing to shared community practices, from a position of non-neutral struggles to transcend these practices and overcome their constraints” (p.15). She opposes “the ideology of adaptation and control so prevalent in science and research” and instead champions “a novel transformative onto-epistemology, coupled with the socio-political ethos of equality and social justice” (p.15). Her methodology includes

1. “A duly historicized account of processes in question”

2. “An ethical-political stance achieved within a critical inquiry into socially constructed forms of knowledge and their history”

3. “A practical intervention in the course of social life” (p.15)

She characterizes this work as “a strong rebuttal of science normativity,” particularly an assumption of objectivity. And she aligns this approach with “works that emphasize the need to decolonize knowledge and overcome its hegemonic and racist roots and entailments” (p.14). Stetsenko goes on to argue that “classical forms of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity … are actually deeply flawed and ultimately not efficacious — in addition to them being hegemonic and racist,” and science’s “success has been achieved in spite of, not due to, a rigid imposition of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity” (p.19). She sees this critique as “admittedly quite radical.” (To me, these critiques don’t sound new or radical or uniquely CHAT-oriented — they sound like 1980s-1990s Donna Haraway, along with many others in the rhetoric of science and in ethnography more broadly.) 

To further her argument, Stetsenko takes a side trip into “works that purport to break with established positivist and empiricist models of science … in what is known under the broad label of ‘qualitative methodology’” (p.20). Stektsenko spends a couple of pages reviewing qualitative research textbooks and picking out cites that support her argument that qualitative research actually nudges us toward scientistic understandings. She concedes that the textbook genre might push these descriptions to be “non-flexible, authoritative, nearly universalistic, and as if set in stone” (p.21). Nevertheless, she argues, these textbooks push researchers to fit in by building on the status quo rather than her preferred approach of “breaking the rules, daring to innovate, creating novelty, and generally moving beyond what is ‘given.’” She charges that “the common tacit strategy of following with the status quo and normativity in science and research in fact belies a deeply seated philosophy that prioritizes the social over the individual, tradition over innovation, compliance over daring, and the past over the present and future. … Ultimately, this strategy reflects a hegemonic, patriarchal, and coercive view of science where rank-and-file members of community practice have no authority and, essentially, make no difference and do not matter” (p.22). Stetsenko ultimately blames this state of affairs on “the workings of capitalism, and the structures of power and control that accompany and reinforce it, with its instrumentalist drive for profit at any cost” (p.22).

Where to start?

Let’s start with A.N. Leontiev, with whom Stetsenko studied and collaborated at Moscow University in the mid-1970s. What would Leontiev think? We actually know, because Levitin interviewed him about the question of methodological pluralism. From my review of Levitin’s 1982 book:

Leontiev begins the interview by taking a swipe at American psychology, which (he says) accumulates facts but has not developed the theoretical and methodological foundations to interpret them (p.111). "Soviet psychology has rejected the path of methodological pluralism of which Western psychology is so proud. I think this is false pride, because the old adage, 'many approaches mean no approach' has a lot of truth to it" (p.112).

With this point in mind — that Leontiev argued for a single theoretical and methodological approach and attributed it to the superior Soviet (and, obviously, non-capitalist) approach, and contrasted it favorably with the Western (capitalist) approach of methodological pluralism — I have a hard time crediting Stetsenko’s claim that capitalism is at the root of this “hegemonic, patriarchal, and coercive view of science.” Capitalism’s “​​instrumentalist drive for profit at any cost” seems better suited for multiplying methodological approaches and destabilizing received knowledge. It’s not for nothing that postmodernism has been characterized as the logic of late capitalism. 

More broadly, this discussion of “what is known under the broad label of ‘qualitative methodology’” seems almost like shadowboxing — as if Stetsenko has some adversary making claims about qualitative methodology, and she wants to rebut these arguments without citing them. Without this broader conversation, her critique is hard to follow: We don’t know the terms or stakes of the discussion. And the term “qualitative methodology” is far, far too open to anchor that discussion. As Stetsenko concedes, qualitative research textbooks explicitly acknowledge that different paradigms use qualitative research (p.19). One’s paradigm might affect how you conduct an interview, analyze the results, and generalize your findings, but positivists, constructivists, and poststructuralists alike might conduct interviews, i.e., collect qualitative data. (In fact, most CHAT research I’ve seen would qualify as qualitative research.) 

Ultimately, I’m just not sure where Stetsenko is going here or how her proposal significantly diverges from so much work I’ve seen from the 1980s and even earlier. When she argues that research findings can’t be seen as final truths, and instead that we must see science as being made up of “mis/takes — up-takes, re-takes, and problems rather than solutions or final answers” (p.28), to me, that sounds like the essence of the scientific method. Certainly it’s been part of the discussion of social studies of science (SSS) from at least Latour & Woolgar on. 

Unfortunately, this side quest to characterize qualitative research obscures what I think is an important part of Stetsenko’s approach: the fact that it is interventionist. And I think this underdiscussed aspect might have been a better angle for exploring the uniqueness of her approach. It would have been interesting to see it contrasted with other interventionist approaches that don’t have a CHAT background (such as participatory action research). Interestingly, the next chapter does discuss interventionist approaches, including Stetsenko’s, in more detail.

Chapter 3. “Agency and Activity of Students from Non-Dominant Groups: Methodological and Ethical Issues” by Isabelle Rioux and Patricia Dionne (pp.46-70)

In this chapter, Rioux and Dionne conduct a literature review that overviews different interventionist approaches based in CHAT: social design experiments (Gutierrez & Jurow), transformative activist stance (Stetsenko), Change Laboratory (Engeström), the clinic of activity (Clot), and studies aimed at understanding students’ activity (various). The authors examine how each approach handles agency, which in the CHAT tradition is based on action, and power relations (pp.47-49). I found this chapter to be a useful overview and contrast, and it will join similar overviews such as Sannino’s “Activity theory as an activist and interventionist theory” in my arsenal of readings for graduate students.

Chapter 4. “The Constant or Person-as-Place, and Research Life: Sustaining Collaboration between University-Based and Field-Based Co-Researchers” by Beth Ferholt and Chris Schuck (pp.71-101)

Beth Ferholt’s work on playworlds — the consensual worlds that children and adults create through their play, analyzed in terms of perezhivaniya — came on my radar sometime last year. This chapter considers how the authors investigated a playword case and what it can tell us about the bidirectional relationship implied in the research-life process, in which the research generates questions for one to solve in one’s own life, and “one’s life becomes a means of generating questions so one can study these questions through research” (p.71). 

Quick correction here: the authors state that the original unit of analysis in playworld research was indeed perezhivanie, but they found themselves working toward a new unit of analysis (p.74). This UoA is not elaborated here, but will be in a promised upcoming paper. 

Chapter 5. “Dialogical Epistemology as a Resource of CHAT Methodology in the Close Interaction of Science and Society” by Ritva Engeström (pp.102-126)

Just a quick note here that Ritva Engeström’s “Voice as communicative action” was a big influence on my early work in genre + activity theory in the late 1990s. It’s great to see her in this collection, where she puts her finger on an issue that I’ve been thinking about these days: “What does a unit of analysis mean in research practice?” (p.109). She specifically asks this question in the context of developmental work research and change labs. She kindly cites my thoughts on the object as bounding the activity system (p.110), and also reviews Langemeyer’s focus on the tool for similar purposes, before discussing her own focus on the subject as problematic due to the fact that “individual subjects in a joint activity share the process of engagement but simultaneously are constructing their subjectively unique understandings of issues associated with ongoing activities” (p.110). This take is specifically useful if we are considering “a unit of analysis for semiotic mediation” (p.111). 

Chapter 10. “A Reflection on CHAT’s History and Direction: Interview with Michael Cole” by Patricia Dionne and Alfredo Jornet (pp.244-261)

Let’s skip to the last chapter, where the editors interview Mike Cole. Cole discusses the term “cultural-historical activity theory” as connecting the Vygotsky and Leontiev schools (p.245). He traces the term back to a 1985 conference in Utrecht where he first met Yrjö Engeström (p.246). They compared approaches and he found Engeström’s triangle to represent a more “inclusive” approach in terms of integrating the two traditions (p.246). Over time, different “flavors” of CHAT emerged (p.247). 

Cole discusses a broad number of topics here, from perezhivanie (p.248) to the tension between Vygotsky’s sign-centric approach and Leontiev’s activity-centered approach (p.249) to cross-cultural research (pp.249-51) and ecological validity (pp.251-256). All in all, it’s a solid mediation on nearly 40 years of CHAT by someone who saw the whole thing unfold and who is still thinking broadly and deeply about it.

So what did I think of this collection? Like most collections, it is not entirely even — some chapters really stand out more than others. But on balance, it brings us some real insights on CHAT’s past, present, and future practice. If you’re interested in considering advanced questions on CHAT methodology, definitely pick it up.

(I'll be keynoting the DATIS workshop at ECIS!)

 I'm excited to announce that I'll be keynoting the 5th Developing Activity Theory in Information Studies (DATIS) Workshop at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2024)!

Here's the description:

Featuring a keynote from Dr. Clay Spinuzzi, this edition will delve into 4th generation AT, encouraging discussions that align with the ECIS theme "People First: Constructing Digital Futures Together". We aim to highlight the technological, ethical, social, and cultural facets of IS, all central to AT.

Whether you're an Early Career Researcher, a PhD student, or a seasoned scholar, DATIS offers a unique platform to reflect, gain insights, and receive feedback on your work. This workshop is not just about presenting papers; it's about fostering a robust community, sharing dilemmas, and constructing digital futures together.

Reading :: Cognition in the Wild

 Cognition in the Wild

by Edwin Hutchins

Note: The link goes to the 1996 revised edition, but my copy is the 1995 MIT Press edition. 

This book changed my life. In the mid 1990s, I was a new PhD student with a serious lifelong addiction to science fiction. What I liked about science fiction was how authors would introduce a bizarre premise, then extrapolate how that premise would change premises, cultures, and motives. But when I started reading books like this one and Vygotsky’s Mind in Society, I realized that sociocognitive studies were stranger and more bizarre than fiction. Even the most out-there science fiction had not challenged the premise of the individual mind the way that these studies did. I gave up science fiction — and fiction reading in general — that year, and haven’t looked back.

Surprisingly, I haven’t reviewed Cognition in the Wild on this blog. I started blogging in 2003, and by that time, the arguments in the book had become part of my basic premises (for instance, the notion of genre ecologies in my 2003 book Tracing Genres through Organizations is premised on the “tool ecology” Hutchins describes here) and launched me into other readings, such as Latour’s parallel thoughts on symmetry. 

That Latour link summarizes his review of the book, and I encourage readers to read it if they want a thorough, thoughtful review of Hutchins’ essential contributions. Here, I’ll just hit a few highlights related to how the book impacted my view of the world.

Hutchins aims to put cognition back into the social and cultural world — treating groups of people and their environment as a cognitive/computational system (p.xiv). He brilliantly does this by examining cases in which people’s cognition is unquestionably not just going on inside their heads. Most of the book examines navigation aboard a US Navy ship, tracing the different calculations that are made by the team on the bridge of the ship — not just the sailors, but also the specialized navigation tools they use, working as a whole system. He convincingly argues that the team is able to solve complex problems that, at first glance, no individual is even remotely capable of solving. (As Latour says, Hutchins’ account is in many ways parallel to John Law’s historical study of navigation in his 1986 chapter “On the methods of long distance control: Vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India.”) Hutchins examines the individuals and tools involved in navigation, but also the way that broader problems and solutions are culturally structured, the ways that identities structure dynamics in navigation, and how the implementation of computational systems is grounded in their representational aspects. He considers how knowledge and practice are “crystallized” in the physical structure of artifacts and how several representational structures can be superimposed in a single framework, organizing schemata. And he considers how each tool creates the environment for the others. 

Once we account for the system that has accumulated around the activity of navigation, what is left? Hutchins argues that what’s left is mundane cognitive abilities, “abilities that are found in a thousand other task settings” (p.133). In other words, many of the complex tasks that we attribute to special cognitive abilities (genius, aptitude, knack) are attributable to working within the systems that are handed down to us. This premise still largely rings true to me. In the mid-1990s, we in writing studies had developed an account congenial to this one, based in genre studies, and you can see me clumsily trying to link this genre account to Hutchins’ in Tracing Genres and beyond. Among other things, Hutchins’ account led me to really examine and value the expertise in each case study I’ve conducted: people develop expertise together, through local innovations as well as collective solutions, and that expertise gets built into their tools, practices, and environments. Using these resources, people become capable of things that, on paper, they shouldn’t have the cognitive ability or expertise to do. As Hutchins argues, “the collection through time of partial solutions to frequently encountered problems is what culture does for us” (pp.168-169). And a few pages later: “If we ascribe to individual minds in isolation the properties of systems that are actually composed of individuals manipulating systems of cultural artifacts, then we have attributed to individual minds a process that they do not necessarily have, and we have failed to ask about the processes they actually must have in order to manipulate the artifacts” (p.173). 

But by accepting those resources, they also accept the premises and framing that underlie each of these. 

Yet people also exercise agency, and this means that they also contribute to these systems, trouble and destabilize them, and layer in different logics and assumptions. This aspect is not explored well in Cognition in the Wild, perhaps because the major empirical work is derived from a Navy ship, an environment in which sailors don’t necessarily work long enough to develop the expertise to innovate well (and in an organization that is necessarily very hierarchical). Still, he argues later in the book that “I believe the real power of human cognition lies in our ability to flexibly construct functional systems that accomplish our goals by bringing bits of structure into coordination” (p.316).

With the above in mind, Hutchins argues that “Learning is adaptive reorganization in a complex system” (p.289, his emphasis). He also addresses the question of why we talk to ourselves: for self-regulation, not communication (p.313-315, cf. Vygotsky on inner speech and externalization). 

Skipping a bit: Hutchins concludes that culture is “a human cognitive process that takes place both inside and outside the minds of people, It is a process in which our everyday cultural practices are enacted. I am proposing an integrated view of human cognition in which a major component of culture is a cognitive process … and cognition is a cultural process” (p.354). And “culture is a process, and the ‘things’ that appear on list-like definitions of culture are residua of the process. Culture is an adaptive process that accumulates partial solutions to frequently encountered problems” (p.354). 

Unfortunately, Hutchins concludes, cognitive science has attempted to remake the person in the image of the computer (p.363). What he attempts to do here is to provide a new template for understanding human cognition. This is an ambitious undertaking, and one that has been taken up in broadly sociocultural and sociocognitive contexts. As the above-linked review says, in reading this account, Latour was compelled to lift his famous “ban” on cognitive explanations. 

Nearly thirty years later, this book is still insightful and still relevant. I can see why it helped to persuade me to give up fiction. And if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it.

Reading :: Pigs for the Ancestors

Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People 2nd Edition

by Roy A. Rappaport

Thanks to John Traphagan, a former professor of religion here at UT, for mentioning this book to me — he brought it up frequently when we cotaught a qualitative methods course for the HDO MA program here at UT. I was finally able to read it late last year, and now that I’ve cleared the decks with some of my current writing projects, I’m finally able to review it.

The book is not always easy to read: Rappaport’s prose is dense and sometimes redundant. But that denseness reflects the denseness of the analysis. 

The back blurb says that this book is “the most important and widely cited book ever published in ecological anthropology.” The book was first published in 1968, based on Rappaport’s dissertation, describing fieldwork in New Guinea between October 1962-December 1963 (p.xiii). Specifically, he examines “the Tsembaga, [who] are a group of about 200 Maring-speaking people” who “occupy an area of slightly more than three square miles” (p.8). These people had only slight contact with Europeans. The Tsembaga describe two broad categories of spirits.

The rawa mai are spirits who occupy the lower part of the territory, associated with the lower part of the body: fecundity, strength (p.39). These are associated with cold and wetness (p.39) as well as the cycle of life and death. They are composed of two subcategories both associated with the upper parts of the territory: the nonhuman koipa mangian and the rawa tukump, who are the “spirits of those Tsembaga who have died of illness or accident” (p.38). They are “spirits of rot” and intermediaries between the living and the koipa mangian (p.39). 

The rawa mugi (red spirits) occupy the upper part of the territory. “They are the spirits of Tsembaga who have been killed in warfare” (p.39). They are concerned with the living and warfare, and they are associated with heat, dryness, hardness, and strength — and the body’s upper part. They are also associated with mammals. 

The Tsembaga conduct subsistence farming in gardens, living in small villages. And they keep pigs — most of the time, as pets who live with people and raid their gardens. But every 12-15 years, Tsembagan villages go to war with their neighbors. And when they do, they sacrifice most of their pigs to the red spirits of their ancestors who have fallen in war — and the living Tsembaga cook and eat the pigs, strengthening themselves for the upcoming war in a ritual that can last up to a year. These wars themselves are brief and do not incur many deaths. Afterwards, they find peace for another 12-15 years.

What is happening here? Rappaport identifies two models of the environment: the operational and the cognized (pp.237-242).

The cognized model guides the Tsembaga’s actions, eliciting appropriate behavior for their material environment. It includes the cosmology described above and the rituals for preparing for war.

The operational model guides the anthropologist’s analysis, highlighting other aspects of the environment. For instance, Rappaport calculates how many calories are being supplied by the Tsembaga gardens, how many are expended in their work, and how many are being consumed by the Tsembaga vs. the pigs. He concludes that the carrying capacity of the territory is reached every 12-15 years, and once it’s reached, different villages have to compete for insufficient resources, leading to war. That war involves killing and eating most of the pigs, resetting the village’s total consumption of calories so that it’s below the carrying capacity of the land.

Importantly, Rappaport provides the two models without elevating one above the other. These are two explanations, but they don’t necessarily need to compete. The Tsembaga have a model that guides and regulates their interaction with the environment in a sustainable way. The functional anthropologist has an alternate model that explains how the first model results in sustainability. The emic and the etic are thrown into sharp relief here, both as methods of meaning-making.

Overall, it’s a fascinating book. It’s worth noting that the main text is only 242 pages, with pp.243-501 devoted to appendices and back matter. I highly recommend it!

Reading :: Problem Spaces

Problem Spaces: How and Why Methodology Matters

by Celia Lury

My collaborator David Guile suggested this 2021 book to me late last year. In it, Lury considers the question: In a new “empire of truth,” i.e., a world in which digital public spaces (Google, Facebook) host public discussions with different types of evidence, data, and metrics, how do we better understand fact-making?

Lury suggests that to address this question, we need a new understanding of problem space. “In established methodological terms, a problem space is a representation of a problem in terms of relations between three components: givens, goals, and operators” (p.2). Here, “the problem space contains the problem.” But, she says, that container metaphor is inadequate because “the problem … becomes a problem as it is investigated” (p.2) so we must instead “pay attention to the constantly changing relations between givens, goals, and operators in which a problem is transformed” (p.3). To address that issue, “the book outlines a compositional methodology,” which entails “an understanding of a problem as a form of process” (p.3). Thus “the concept of a problem space put forward here is that it is a space of methodological potential that is with-in and out-with the ongoing transformation of a problem. The potential is realized in a methodology that, rather than responding only to the initial presentation of a problem, composes the problem again and again” (p.5). Quoting Rockburne, she characterizes such a problem as “a ‘problem that problematizes itself’” (p.6).

What does such an approach entail? “This book emphasizes the doing or practice of methods to make visible the work that goes into the accomplishment of epistemological values” (p.16). And “we describe methods as gerunds; that is, as the active present tense forms of verbs that function as nouns” (p.17). She thus views “methods as sites of engagement” (p.19).

To develop this argument, in Ch.1, Lury compares “five approaches relevant to the elaboration of concept of a problem space,” grounded in Dewey, Simon, Haraway, Jullien, and Appadurai. All focus on the process of making or composing problems (p.23). These represent “vastly different traditions of thought,” but each “provides an understanding of space,” not as a container, but as “how a problem is happening — is distributed — not in but across many places at a time and in many times in a place” (p.47). These authors all “link their understanding of method … to more-or-less explicit understandings of potential” and thus “their understandings contribute to an understanding of methodological potential as constituted in the operation of limits with-in and out-with problem spaces” (p.47).

Lury suggests we need to think such approaches through because of “recent changes in the epistemological infrastructure,” which she discusses in Part II (Ch.2-4). Skipping a bit, I’ll focus on her Ch.4 argument about the platformatization of the epistemic infrastructure, with the term referring to architectural, political, computational, and figurative aspects of platforms (p.117). For instance, she discusses how statistical packages such as SPSS didn’t just result in new ways of doing quantitative research, they resulted in a different kind of quantitative research (p.125).

In Part III, Lury turns to the question of the implications of platformatization for compositional methodology. She argues that platformatization yields at least three areas of concern:

• “The naively artificial character of the empirical”: the issue that, when measures become targets, they replace the phenomena they represent (pp.153-155). 
• “The ontological multiplicity of the epistemological object”: recursion in methods yields ontological multiplicity, which opens new vistas for research, but also new angles of functionalism and prescriptionism (pp.156-165).
• “Transcontextualism” (p,.166) — (a note here, this heading is in a different sentence form and at a different level from the other two. I’m lumping it in here because, just before #1, she forecasts three areas of concern. But it’s possible that she only covered two areas of concern in that section and Transcontextualism begins a new section.) Today’s problem spaces, Lury argues, have “expanded indexical dynamics,” driving us to ask “whether and how to deal with a problem’s connections to its context(s)” (p.166).

Cards on the table: around the end of this chapter, I was ground down by the dense argumentation. Lury illustrates these arguments with examples, but these examples are largely not that accessible to me, and her arguments themselves are grounded in philosophical terms and arguments that are similarly not that accessible. Ultimately, I found the book harder to follow than much of her source material (e.g., Latour, Law, Haraway).

Is this book worth reading? I think it is, and I think I’ll probably return to it periodically. But it’s also dense and sometimes difficult to get through. Give yourself plenty of time to get through it.

Reading :: How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became

How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became: An Experiment in Autoethnography

By Charles Bazerman

Charles Bazerman has been a pivotal figure in writing studies for decades: as an author of textbooks, as a methodologist, as a genre scholar, as a foremost thinker on how to understand writing as developing as a cultural practice. Most recently, he has investigated the lifelong development of writing. In this book, which is the first book in the Lifespan Writing Research book series, Bazerman examines his own lifelong trajectory as a writer, and calls for further work in this area. 

The book is a true autoethnography in the sense that Bazerman doesn’t offer a sanitized set of reflections. Rather, he goes back through his extensive personal archives of school-age writing assignments and scholarly drafts to examine how his writing techniques, themes, and concerns changed over time. That is, although reflective, the account is also based in archival evidence.

So how does this book fare? As a reader, I was divided. 

The fact that Bazerman is a central figure in our field (and one whom I personally admire) makes the book interesting to me. We get to see how he took his journey toward writing studies and the choices he made along the way, and he is unflinching in discussing his limitations and mistakes as a writer throughout his life. As he says on p.117, “Writing, of course, is fraught with anxiety, and also open to digression, distraction, or even avoidance,” and Bazerman talks openly about these anxieties and how he has dealt with them throughout his life. This sentiment is apparently common among writers (as I discovered some years ago in a workgroup session Chuck led, in which participating writing researchers arrayed around a table told their literacy narratives, which all seemed centered around anxiety). Nevertheless, Bazerman discusses how these anxieties propelled his development as he shifted from an early interest in physics to literary studies to more pragmatic writing instruction as an inner-city high school teacher. At the same time, a strong allegiance to social justice shaped his path, as did a consistent curiosity and drive to improve himself. 

Bazerman was, of course, raised in the 1960s, and some of the things he describes doing just don’t compute for my Gen X mind. Time and again he describes taking on a job (in the Peace Corps, as a camp counselor, as part of a team developing pedagogical materials) only to decide a couple of weeks later that it wasn’t for him, quitting the job and moving to another pursuit. (In a parallel theme, he also repeatedly “became persona non grata for advocating unpopular programs” (p.221)). He also describes what I can only characterize as “Forrest Gump” moments in which he has brushes with significant history: rooming with a student who would eventually become an architect of the Gulf War, writing early scripts for a TV program that eventually aired as Sesame Street (the scripts were not filmed), and taking a road trip to San Francisco “just in time to see the moon landing televised on the ceiling of the Fillmore West during a Joe Cocker and Country Joe and the Fish concert” (p.116). Counterbalancing this freedom was the ever-present threat of the draft, which pushed Bazerman to continue his college studies and then his graduate studies. 

As we get to Ch.18, Bazerman begins discussing his scholarly work, including his fateful meeting with Carolyn Miller that got him thinking about genre (p.143). This concept dovetailed with his earlier reading on social perspectives and prepared him for later becoming aware of Yrjo Engestrom’s work at a 1992 conference (p.144, footnote 7). In Ch.19, he discusses becoming interested in the sociology of science, and how (in another Forrest Gump moment) a faculty colleague “suggested that I contact Robert Merton, the founder of the field, who was just a subway ride uptown at Columbia University” (p.151). Through that encounter, Bazerman began sitting in on Merton’s graduate seminars, honing his critique and approach to science studies, and laying the foundation for his book Shaping Written Knowledge. Meanwhile, he also participated in an NEH summer seminar at Carnegie-Mellon led by Richard Young, where he was introduced to the classical rhetorical tradition (which he found useful but limited, p.160). He reached an inflection point, one that the field of writing studies itself was approaching: “I recognized that writing studies would benefit from a sociologically oriented research program to supplement the on-going cognitive psychological research program of process studies. I also started to gain the sociological and historical tools to understand how I could support the substantive research along with institutional presence and legitimacy of writing studies” (p.162). 

This inflection point, of course, drew him to the works of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and their more recent synthesis in Engestrom. “Over the next few years, I drew on David Russell’s formulations of activity systems (Russell, 1994), and I collaborated with him on a couple of collections that encouraged work in a similar vein (Russell & Bazerman, 1997i; Bazerman & Russell, 2003g)” (pp.199-200; see also pp.212-213; n.b., David R. Russell was my dissertation director).  

As readers will intuit, I found this later part of the book far more interesting than the earlier parts. Although Bazerman’s focus is on how writing changes over the lifespan, I realized that my focus was more on understanding the background of his scholarly works and, through them, that background’s impact on our field. And I think this is the underlying tension in the book: Without the unique positioning of the author as a foremost scholar of writing studies, the early part of the book is hard to find interesting. That is, it probably can’t serve as a model for more general lifespan writing research — if it were a lesser light, would we be interested in their reflections on their grade-school essays? 

In any case, if you are interested in lifespan writing research, in the development of writing studies, or in the background of Bazerman’s impressive scholarship, I highly recommend this book.