Reproducing Actions, Reproducing Power: Local Ideologies and Everyday Practices of Participation at a California Community Bike Shop

Abstract

The study of participation within linguistic anthropology has developed a nuanced understanding of participant roles and examined the process by which such roles are enacted in participation frameworks. This paper examines what I call modes of engagement, that is, role‐based differential use of forms of embodied and linguistic participation. I argue that such engagement modes are central in defining and differentiating participant roles themselves. The analysis focuses on data gathered at a bilingual bicycle‐repair shop with an overtly prescriptive ideology of participation. Ethnographic and interactional analysis demonstrates that such ideologies both influence and are shaped by local practices, and have material consequences for who can participate and how they do so.

Dialogic Embodied Action: Using Gesture to Organize Sequence and Participation in Instructional Interaction

“…The functions of embodied actions, analyzed in a wide range of task-centered settings, have been shown to be deeply interconnected both to relevant features of their material environment and to the social setting that structures this surround and imbues it with meaning (C. Goodwin, 2003Goodwin, , 2007aStreeck, 2002Streeck, , 2009). This article contributes to a contextualized understanding of gesture by analyzing data collected during an ethnographic study conducted at Bica Lo-Teca, a bilingual (SpanishEnglish) community bike shop in California (Arnold, 2012). 2 The examples presented here were recorded at Open Shop sessions, during which customers brought broken bicycles in to Bica for free repair.…”

“…Consequently, volunteers were expected to teach customers how to do the repair without doing it for them. As I argue elsewhere (Arnold, 2012), this ideology served as the motivation for the particular teaching techniques used by the Bica volunteers, who found ways to teach customers how to do repair-related tasks without actually doing the tasks themselves.…”

“…I have discussed these in greater detail(Arnold, 2012). Downloaded by [Boston College] at 19:11 25 October 2012…”

“There's no rules. It's hackathon.”: Negotiating Commitment in a Context of Volatile Sociality

“…), and, indeed, hackathons (Irani ). We ask how the associated “ideologies of participation” (Arnold ) and the types of subjectivities that they presuppose intersect with participation frameworks that emerge at an event like “Hacking Journalism.”…”

“…But we also want to propose that the specific type of joint activity that we analyze is sociohistorically situated in ways that impose particular opportunities and constraints on participants, and that culturally inflect the types of joint commitments that they negotiate. In order to do this, we focus on elements of participation that emerge at the intersection of interpersonal “participation frameworks” (Goodwin and Goodwin ) and overarching “ideologies of participation” (Arnold ) that impinge on the organizational parameters of joint activity.…”