4.07.2006

Methodological Question

What kind of theoretical/research stance enables one to accurately perceive the connections between private/home/leisure and private/workplace/work without having to create the kind of binary that I just used to describe it?

Cultural Studies has some interesting tools (i.e. the cultural circuit), but seems to constitute a mostly critical stance.

Marketing sees the personal/home/leisure site as critical, but does not seem to have a well-developed discourse for locating and differentiating activities that "produce," wherever they occur. Preserves the consumption/production binary that occludes the important work that "consumers" do in a distributed economy.

4 comments:

Lance said...

Sounds like sociohistoric theory (especially a la Paul Prior & some of his students out of U of Illinois) would fit the bill. Check out session G.24 in the online program for this year's CCCC. If you follow the "more" link, paying special attention to the general intro and speaker 1's abstract, I think you'll see what I mean.

Anonymous said...

I dunno--I find the fact that I sometimes compose sentences in my head while pretending to read the back of a cereal box in my pjs theory enough. :)

Doc Mara said...

Thanks Lance. I'm doing some work with heterogeneity right now and am tracking what Clay Spinuzzi is doing with dialectic vs. splicing re: textual practices. I get sorta stuck with where I can take genre analysis or activity theory (the first oversimplifies how things emerge by focusing on similarities and the latter seems too task oriented). Thanks for introducing me to Kevin Roozen's work on tracing activity across settings. I'll take a closer look

Oh, and Dr. Hawhee, don't tease us with your sophisticated Cultural Analysis while making it look so easy. I KNOW you are wearing bunny slippers when you step into the kitchen "lab."

Anonymous said...

heh. my slippers are high tops.