Context

I am becoming a big fan of Latour – not only of his ideas, but also his wit, clever phrasing, examples, and use of exclamation points. Working through my thesis while reading this book has also given me a lots to think about in terms of the sociological dimension of my project.
Most saliently in this section, Latour discusses how sociologists place actors in Contexts. As he says in his typically deadpan tone: “At Context, there is no place to park” (167). When I first began reading for my thesis, I questioned why a researcher my choose to focus on the specific composing processes of a small number of students (such as in Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater's Academic Literacies). It seemed difficult to say something significant from such a small sample. But I found that in choosing to focus my study on a type of writing, I often had to elide the unique stories of individual students, focusing instead on Trends, Patterns, Themes, and indeed Contexts. And if I had to do the whole thing over again, I might just choose one or two students to focus on. I wonder if my impulse to do so stems from a resistance, similar to Latour's, of assigning actors to a context.

Still, the reason I chose not to focus on those individual stories is that at the end of the day, I wanted to find out something useful to my teaching. (I think this is the goal of much ethnographic writing research). My same concern remains for Latour: Generalizations may be artificial, but they are also helpful.

I'm also wondering about how avoiding Context keeps us from cynicism (which may be bred by an approach like Berlin's). If we stop seeing people as “products” of a context, does the lead to a more optimistic assessment of them? Or is this all a superfluous exercise in (Hairston alert!) “celebrating diversity”?

Interestingly, one of my student interviewees objected to a writing assignment, not unlike Berlin's, that asked her to research the larger social and historical context of one of her favorite articles of clothing. She's 19, but she sounds very Latourian, or maybe like one of Latour's Actors, desperate to be understood on her own terms. I quote her eloquent and significant argument here because it so clearly epitomizes the struggle that arises between the personal and the academic: students feel that the academic research alters the existing personal meaning.

Each garment has its own history for me, and I know the story of the garment and
I know the very specific cultural context of that garment because I wore it. And
for this paper I had to draw out and almost remove the personal aspect of it and
look for broad historical and broad cultural context which in some ways is
artificial . . . and so I just knew that a lot of things I was saying in this
paper, I was putting someone else's opinion on it and it wasn't necessarily
true.