Of Traversals and Hybrid Spaces: Science in the Community

Abstract

This article explores the enactment of scientific knowledge within a grassroots organization. It describes the highly distributed nature of the organization's resources and frames members' knowing in terms of traversals, movements across boundaries on the landscape and within institutions, and in terms of hybrid spaces. It was found that through their interactions with others, objects and discourse emerge that are hybrids between formal scientific and local situated concerns. The authors conclude by relating members' knowledgeable movement to the emergence of a new community. 1 We use the phrase knowledgeable doings to emphasize that knowledge is always a performance judged as such by the appropriate community of practice. Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 09:23 04 November 2014Many NGOs, certainly the smaller ones involved in stream restoration work, present a very unstable worksite. Their memberships, cash flow, activities, and active relationships change (often unpredictably) on a very rapid time scale. They can look very different on a year-to-year or even season-to-season basis. During the course of our research, this heterogeneous, fluid nature of the organization struck us as a defining and unique characteristic of the NGO at the core of our study. We became interested in understanding how these fluid organizations learned, came to know, and enacted scientific practice. How did the community in which the activists worked shape their activities and learning? What kind of resources did they use in order to know the watershed? How were they able to gain access to the resources they needed in order to carry out their learning activities?This article is a first step in the work involved in answering questions such as these. We introduce and explore three prominent themes we noticed in the course of our participant-observer research project. By framing the NGO and its members' activities in these terms, we contribute to the project of understanding knowing in a distributed, uncertain situation.We discuss three interrelated features of the NGO's knowledgeable activity:1. The highly distributed nature of the centers and relationships in which knowledge or knowledge production was enacted.2. The importance of traversals, that is, the phenomenon of traversing both institutional and occupational boundaries as different people and nonhumans are recruited to carry out an activity, and the movement over and interrogation of the landscape that is an integral part of knowledge-producing activity.3. The new community that emerges (or communities that emerge) as a result of the engagement of people, tools, artifacts, and the landscape.

The emergence of a community mapping network: coastal eelgrass mapping in British Columbia

“…However, the function of that production is far from singular, knowledge about eelgrass is enlisted to do several things and also is made to travel. This movement (flow) of knowledge embodied in people and texts creates stability in the network and thus constitutes a stabilizing performance, as has been shown in the context of a local NGO concerned with watershed health (Lee and Roth, 2003b). We support this claim by analyzing interviews with members but also draw from our ethnographic study as whole.…”

Science education as/for participation in the community

“…Likewise, scientific literacy in everyday community life then means to be competent in finding whatever one needs to know at the moment one needs to know it. Our research in one community showed that it is exactly in this way that an environmentalist group concerned about the health of the watershed in which their community lies draws on resources distributed across this community to bring about changes (while avoiding conflict) to attitudes and practices (Lee & Roth, 2003).…”

“Vygotsky’s Neglected Legacy”: Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

“…Some scholars therefore reject the idea of learning as an activity system (Holzkamp, 1983), whereas others insist that learning can be planned and analyzed as activity system (e.g., Davidov, 1988;Lompscher, 1999). A snapshot of activities described in the CHAT educational literature include redesigning instruction (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999; S. Lee & Roth, 2003a), planning for teacher learning (Ball, 2000;Edwards & Protheroe, 2004;Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999;Kärkkäinen, 1999), providing for learning or physical disabilities (Bakhurst & Padden, 2001;Daniels & Cole, 2002;Kosonen & Hakkarainen, 2006), and managing schools (Gronn, 2000;Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004); all these concrete activities, as true of activities in general, are characterized by the collective nature of their motives (Leont'ev, 1981). In the realization of collective motives, an activity system contributes to the survival of society and therefore the survival of each individual, in and through whose actions society is realized and exists (Holzkamp, 1991).…”