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Handout: King,UCGS higher seminar, 2 December, 2014 -- talk
website: http://paradoxdive.blogspot.com/p/seminar.html
Ume Centre for Gender Studies, Ume University, Sweden; UCGS
Library, Social Sciences 4th floor.
Diving into the paradox - what happens AFTER the critique? A
seminar on making Knowledges caring and careful
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College
Park / Email: [email protected]
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ ; follow on twitter
@katkingumd ; pinterest talksite:
http://pinterest.com/katkingumd/talksites/
People often cannot see what they take for granted until they
encounter someone who does not take it for granted. (Bowker and
Star 1999: 305)
NEPANTLERAS, WIZARDS, ENOUGH WORLDS, GRACE, AND PERIPHERAL
PARTICIPATIONS
I use the word nepantla to theorize liminality and to talk about
those who facilitate passages between worlds, whom Ive named
nepantleras. (Anzalda 2002:1)
These are what I refer to as wizards: that is, they are both
repositories of local knowledge about the social and technical
situations,
and simultaneously, they know enough of more than one layer to
perform rare cross-layering coordination. By definition, this work
isinterdisciplinary. (Star 1995:107)
I guess Id locate my hope in being part of enough different
worlds simultaneously. . . . Ive tried to model a way of being in
this
kind of an organization that makes sense to me. It makes sense
to me in the ways that its been formed by all these other worlds
that
Im part of. (Suchman & Scharmer 1999)
"Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and
strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a
well-defined
structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year;
enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity
according to
the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if
readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize
alliancewith others committed to egalitarian social relations and
race, gender, sex, class, and social justice, when these other
readings of
power call for alternative oppositional stands." (Sandoval
2000:60)
TRANSCONTEXTUAL PRACTICES:
phrases quoted from Bateson: "genesis of tangles," "the weave of
contextual structure," and "transcontextual syndrome More
Bateson: It seems that both those whose life is enriched by
transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by
transcontextual
confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or
often a double take. A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friendis
not
just that and nothing more. (Star & Ruhleder 1996:127 quote
Bateson 1972:276; Bateson: 272; Star 2010:610)
BOUNDARY OBJECTS (Bowker & Star 1999: 297-8)
"Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several
communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements
of
each of them. Boundary objects are thus both plastic enough to
adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties
employingthem, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity
across sites. They are weakly structured in common use and become
strongly
structured in individual site use. These objects may be abstract
or concrete.... Such objects have different meanings in different
social
worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one
world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The
creation
and management of boundary objects is a key process in
developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting
communities.
The rigor of trancontextual feminist methods comes into play
when we welcome peripheral participations (robust across sites)
as
well as work for an exquisite sensitivity to each horizon of
possible resources and infrastructures, local exigencies, and
differential
memberships (plastic and local). Transcontextual feminisms as I
have come to understand them, work to remain curious, even aboutand
in the midst the affects of affiliation and disidentification,
scoping extensively and scaling intensively among Ecologies of
Knowledge. (In memory of Susan Leigh Star and her work such as
Star 1995)
INTENSIVE PRACTICES, knowledges, definitions, boundary work:
closely negotiated among relatively bounded communities of
practice; such as disciplines-in-the-making, local alliances,
threatened units, long-lived organizations; emphasis on rigor
and
membership
EXTENSIVE PRACTICES, knowledges, definitions, boundary work:
speculative connections, practical coalitions, trial and error
learning; such as transdisciplinary projects, transmedia
storytelling, alternative practices-in-the-making; emphasis on
peripheral
participation and the edges of standardized practices
EXTENSIVE investigations perpendicularly analyze relative and
relational shifts across authoritative and alternative
knowledges
EXTENSIVE displays can work without displacing INTENSIVE work of
specific communities of practice
Drawing on contemporary work in feminist science and technology
research, we are working with an
expanded notion of a learning object to incorporate insights
about boundary objects. This
theoretical reframing asserts that the object participates in
the creation of meanings: of identity, or
usefulness, of function, of possibilities. The concept of a
boundary object was promoted by the late
Susan Leigh Starr (a prominent feminist scholar in
science/technology studies) to assert that objects(material,
digital, discursive, conceptual) participate in the co-production
of reality. At base, the notion
asserts that objects perform important communication work among
people: they are defined enough
to enable people to form common understandings, but weakly
determined so that participants can
modify them to express emergent thinking. (Juhasz & Balsamo
2013)
